Down Cemetery Road

The Spiky Art of Not Giving a Damn

A leather jacket can read as style, but on Emma Thompson in Down Cemetery Road it feels more like body armor. The first time she drifts into frame in Apple TV+'s series, she isn't wearing the clothes so much as sheltering inside them. Her hair is chopped into hard silver spikes, and her slouch carries the air of someone who expects disappointment before anybody even speaks. She plays Zoë Boehm, a private investigator so prickly she treats the world like background noise she never asked for. I've seen Thompson do queens, romantics, and iron-willed matriarchs, but watching her shred a suspect's alibi without pretending to like anyone in the room is a pleasure of its own.



This is unmistakably Mick Herron territory. He gave us the grubby espionage brilliance of Slow Horses, but this story actually came first, back in 2003. Morwenna Banks adapts it here as a kind of cousin to Slough House, swapping London's intelligence basements for the neat, unsettling calm of Oxford suburbia. The opening jolt is blunt enough—a house explodes in the middle of the night and a girl named Dinah disappears into the smoke—but the series is less interested in the blast than in what it shakes loose afterward.