Slow Horses: Gary Oldman is Pungently Good in Darkly Funny Spy Series

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

You could think of the new Apple TV+ series, Slow Horses, as a cross between The Breakfast Club and a John Le Carre novel. 

The serio-comic drama focuses on an obscure department in the British spy agency MI-5, where agents who have disgraced themselves in the field are sent to atone, with a slim possibility of redemption.  

The six-episode season, which focuses on a political kidnapping, is essentially a pilot for a long-running series for the streaming service, with a second season in the can.

Gary Oldman, Rosalind Eleazar and Dustin Demri-Burns in Slow Horses,

There’s both mystery and suspense in Slow Horses, which was adapted from the first of a dozen espionage novels by Mick Herron. Foremost, perhaps, is to the mystery of how long Gary Oldman’s character, Jackson Lamb, can go without washing his greasy mop.  

Lamb, the supervisor of a department known as Slough House, is a pot-bellied day-drinking, chain-smoking, chronically flatulent misanthrope, who peppers his speech with curses and the opposite of motivation speeches: (“Working with you has been the low point in a disappointing career,” or “Bringing you up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog.”). It comes as no surprise that screenwriter Will Smith previously wrote for Armando Iannucci’s TV series, The Thick of It and Veep.

Oldman’s performance is a lot of fun. His character could be the alter-ego to LeCarré’s self-effacing, polite George Smiley, who the actor played in Tinker Tailor, Soldier Spy.  He’s bolstered by such veteran language chewers as Oldman’s Darkest Hour co-star, Kristin Scott Thomas, as an ice-queen MI5 section head, and Jonathan Pryce as a retired master spy,  it’s all pungently watchable.

That said, the series as a whole, directed by Brit TV veteran James Hawes and executive produced by Canada’s Graham Yost (Justified), isn’t always polished, and stutters in the transitions between chatty, dour bureaucratic satire and generic thriller.

The opening scene, and by the far most complex action set piece, sees a scruffily handsome young MI5 agent River Cartwright (Dunkirk’s Jack Lowden) chasing a bombing suspect through a London airport before he makes a really big gaffe. 

For his penance, he’s demoted to “Slough House” where he finds himself picking through bags of garbage, without knowing what he’s supposed to be looking for. 

The department’s name is a weak joke: it’s so far away from head office it might as well be in Slough,  20 miles west of London.  

Jack finds himself at the bottom of a the team of rejects, or “slow horses”, each of whom jealously hides the reason they have fallen into disgrace. It’s a clever idea that secrecy - the central job requirement of the spy business - is linked to  personal shame, though the series doesn’t spend much time working on the character’s therapeutic journeys.

In the shabby offices, Jack joins a team of misfit.: One is an insufferably superior hacker, Roddy (Christopher Chung), another a recovering alcoholic (Saskia Reeves) and the persistently needy Struan (Paul Higgins). 

Some misdeeds are revealed:  Min (Dustin Demri-Burns), is a klutz who left classified documents on a commuter train. But other back stories remain secret, including those of two apparently highly competent young women, Luisa (Rosalind Eleazar) and Sid (Olivia Cooke).

 A warning here: Be careful who you become attached to.  For all its wit, the series is ruthlessly cold-blooded, especially in its central plot, in which a radical White Supremacist group, both bumbling and grotesque,  kidnaps a Muslim Pakistani-English student (Antonio Aakeel) with a plan to kill him on national television. 

When Jack asks what they can done, Jackson snaps back: “Nothing as always.” But sure enough, the Slough House gang find themselves drawn into a labyrinth of plots and crossed agendas, and the usual business of clandestine meetings, corridor chases, USB drives and characters with magical hacking skills. 

My advice is to come for the espionage and stay for the yeasty dialogue and performances, especially for Gary Oldman, and be grateful the technology behind Smell-O-Vision never really took off. 

Slow Horses. Directed by James Hawes. Written by Will Smith, adapted from the novel by Mick Herron. Starring: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, Saskia Reeves, Dustin Demri-Burns, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Paul Higgins, Freddie Fox, Chris Reilly, Steve Waddington, Paul Hilton, Antonio Aakeel, Peter Judd.

Slow Horses begins with the first two episodes on April 1 on Apple TV+, followed by new episodes each week.