It’s not a science fiction show, but somehow the excellent spy series “Slow Horses,” now in its fourth season on Apple TV+, manages a kind of time travel. While recognizably set in the present, with buzzing smartphones and storylines turning on post-9/11 terrorist plots and surveillance technology, the look and feel of the show have an unmistakable throwback vibe.
It’s not just Danny Cohen’s rainy-day cinematography, or the fact that the show’s central figure, the disheveled misanthrope Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), who oversees a ragtag band of disgraced British intelligence agents, looks like he’s been at his battered desk since at least 1975. The key to the show’s retro charm is often more simple than that, as we watch Lamb and his crew deploy such decidedly analog spy methods as documents doctored with Liquid Paper, crunchy chips scattered on a staircase to give away a prowler’s movements, furtive meetings in a laundromat. The current season, which airs its finale on Oct. 2, recently distilled this vintage appeal into a single image: our hero on a dodgy moped, chased through a French village by a mangy dog.
That hero is young River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), the grandson of an elderly retired agent, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), who makes the link to Cold War-era spycraft explicit. In an early episode, David even refers in passing to George Smiley, the rumpled antihero conjured by John le Carré in the 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and definitively embodied by Alec Guinness in the 1979 TV series (and revived by Oldman himself in a 2011 film version).
Indeed, “Slow Horses” plays a bit like le Carré with more firepower. And efficiency: One of the best things about the series from Emmy-winning writer Will Smith is its digestible compactness, unspooling six 40- to 50-minute episodes each season. Also a bit like le Carré, each of the season-long plots, based on novels by Mick Herron, is a tangle of misdirections and fake-outs. The agents of Slough House, the purgatory overseen by Oldman’s Lamb, find themselves vying not only with foreign and domestic enemies but with their internal rivals at “the Park,” the MI5’s sleek headquarters, run by Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).
Indeed, while assorted chases and shoot-outs provide the show’s bloody pulse, its real heart is the uneasy push-pull relationship between the buttoned-up Taverner, played with icy hauteur by Thomas, and the shambling Lamb, played with impish, unsentimental grace by Oldman. The series doesn’t overplay this hand, doling out their scenes together judiciously across the seasons. But each of these unlikely sparring partners finds energy and purpose in contrast to the other. He is clearly stinky; she is sniffy to a fault. I could watch them banter all day.
In the third season, “Real Tigers,” this internal intelligence-service conflict acquired another layer, as Taverner found herself the target of her own boss, steely Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo), and Lamb’s misfits got caught in the crossfire. Though that season featured the most violent denouement yet—a protracted gunfight in an underground bunker that veered fully into action movie territory—it also forefronted a battle of nerves that scrambled our rooting interests.
Still, the troubling moral ambivalence of espionage is more ambience than substance in “Slow Horses.” We hear just enough about the politics underpinning the plots to ground us. The first season followed an apparent white-supremacist scheme to behead a Muslim comedian live online, and Taverner noted tartly to her superiors that perhaps the intelligence services had their eyes on the wrong threat all along. But what really drives “Slow Horses,” and keeps us compulsively tuned in, is the narrative meat and potatoes—or bangers and mash, if you will—of basic thriller suspense, of cracking the code just in time, of finding the killer before he kills again.
As in the best genre properties, this is all thankfully leavened by comedy, a large part of it inspired by Lamb’s execrable hygiene and unconcealed contempt for his employees. “I’ve got hemorrhoids that are more use than you,” is one of his few profane insults that can be repeated in print. Called upon to give an inspiring speech to his troops, he is likely to insult them mercilessly or, at his best behaved, raise a simple toast to a fallen colleague with his hip flask. When pressed by Taverner, though, he sums up his loyalty concisely: “They’re a bunch of losers. But they’re my losers.”
Some of the comic relief is a bit more rote, with bickering agents who fall in love or realize too late they’ve come to rely on each other. And Slough House’s resident computer whiz, callous and callow Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), is a one-joke role with diminishing returns.
Perhaps most affecting, in both comic and pathetic registers, is Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), Lamb’s long-suffering secretary, who doesn’t so much resist his abuse as reflect it back to him in silent, acquiescent horror. With her penetrating eyes and tentative, bird-like movements, Reeves does a lot with very little, much as her put-upon character does. If Taverner is Lamb’s foil, Standish is as close as he has to a friend, even a conscience.
The current season, which features a slightly goofy story about an inbred army of mercenary assassins, is not its strongest, though it is as consistently entertaining as ever, and features a deliciously understated turn by Hugo Weaving as a grizzled ex-C.I.A. villain. And it doubles down on what has become one of the show’s running gags, literally: foot chases through crowded train stations in which unsuspecting bystanders get plowed over by good and bad guys alike. Not the most hilarious bit, honestly, but another example of the old-school pleasures of “Slow Horses.” Who needs high-tech drones or AI hacks when you’ve got a train, or a killer, or a killer on a train, to catch?
