Apple’s Spy Drama Delivers Some of the Year’s Best TV

It’s always been the little details that stand out in *Slow Horses*, the long-running Apple TV+ spy drama returning on Sept. 4. For example, viewers can practically smell the mold and feel the dust that pervades 126 Aldersgate Street in London, known as Slough House. This depressing outpost is where the so-called Slow Horses of MI5 have been banished instead of being handed a pink slip.

Save for computer whiz Roddy Ho’s setup downstairs, it’s a low-tech office meticulously untidy with overflowing trash bins, scattered papers, and takeaway leftovers. Occupied by clapped-out spooks who’ve slipped off the fast track, this grimy workspace near the Barbican tube station has creaking pipes and mildewed walls, making even hand-me-downs look brand new.

Its overseer is the gimlet-eyed spymaster Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman. Lamb is portrayed as a belching, farting, chain-smoking HR nightmare with a paunch, greasy hair, and ill-fitting clothes. He has some of the best lines in the series, such as, “Tell her she best interrogate me in a room with a window. I had lamb Bhuna earlier that’s gonna make its presence felt.”

A Cold War relic with seeming disdain for the screwups who work for him, Lamb has the dour worldview of a pensioner angry at Britain’s post-imperial decline. Despite his grubby facade, he’s unrelentingly brilliant and usually the quickest to sort out what’s what.

Gary Oldman in “Slow Horses.” Image source: Apple

In *Slow Horses*’ fourth season, such details add indispensable texture to a story that revels in subverting the tropes of traditional espionage dramas. Unlike those on the big screen, the spies here have dadbods and various flaws and disorders. There’s a gambling addict and an alcoholic. More than one has anger issues. All of them are castaways who can only dream of a life less ordinary. When the glamorous Emma Flyte — the new head of MI5’s internal security squad known as “the dogs” — derides Lamb’s team as “the rejects,” he shoots back that they don’t like being called that.

Asked how he’d describe them instead, Lamb quips without missing a beat: “The rejects.”

The new season, debuting with a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, is based on *Spook Street* — book #4 in writer Mick Herron’s critically acclaimed collection of Slough House spy novels. Having finished watching all six episodes that Apple allowed the press to screen early, I’d probably sum up my initial reaction as: This might be the show’s best outing yet.

Leroy Kincaide and Ruth Bradley in “Slow Horses.” Image source: Apple

Aside from the same cynical tone that fans have come to love, and the familiar presentation of London as a once-great city rotted out by institutional decline, surprises abound in Season 4. A notable one is the emergence of a shady mercenary played by Hugo Weaving who’s connected to the pasts of both River Cartwright and his grandfather, David Cartwright, aka “The Old Bastard.”

Other new faces this time include Claude Whalen, the irritatingly image-obsessed new “First Desk” of MI5, whose ineptitude contrasts sharply with the icily efficient head of operations, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Hugo Weaving in “Slow Horses.” Image source: Apple

And, oh yeah, there’s a mystery to solve — namely, who bombed a posh London shopping center, and why does one of the breadcrumbs point back to the security service? Also, what’s the bombing’s connection to the elder Cartwright, who narrowly survives assassination while suffering from dementia?

Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright, who thus far has mostly come off as a tryhard understudy of Jackson Lamb, has never been better or more heroic than he is this season. The Slow Horses, as a collective, have always exhibited a mix of earnestness and nitwittery. In Season 4, they continue to do the stupid things you’d expect of the B-team. But they’re also hungry, River most of all, in a way that MI5’s swanky Regent’s Park headquarters’ staff will never understand.

In *Slow Horses*, it’s the unglamorous misfits who confront a dangerous world head-on, one bombing, one hit squad, and one gun battle at a time. And regardless of their expectations, it always ends the same way. In Slough House, they remain.

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Source: Apple TV+, Mick Herron, Rotten Tomatoes