PONIES

The Invisible Women of Cold War Moscow

There is a particular kind of freedom in being completely overlooked. It's a truth women have understood for centuries, but in the espionage genre, it usually takes a backseat to laser watches and rooftop chases. Susanna Fogel and David Iserson’s *PONIES*—which just dropped its eight-episode first season on Peacock—operates on a different frequency. The title itself is intelligence slang for "Persons of No Interest." It refers to the wives of CIA operatives. They are the background noise. The secretaries. The women expected to serve the martinis and ask no questions.

I was not sure what to expect going in. Fogel and Iserson previously collaborated on *The Spy Who Dumped Me*, a film that leaned hard into screwball comedy. This series, set in a meticulously dreary 1977 Moscow, shares a sliver of that DNA but wraps it in a much thicker, more paranoid coat. When two American wives—Bea (Emilia Clarke) and Twila (Haley Lu Richardson)—lose their CIA husbands in a highly suspicious plane crash, they do not pack up and head back to the States. Instead, they realize their invisibility is a superpower. They leverage their grief into field work.



What makes the machinery of the show actually work is not the plotting, which occasionally gets tangled in its own labyrinth of double-crosses and KGB moles. It's the physical and emotional contrast between the two leads. Clarke has spent years dealing with the heavy, regal baggage of playing Daenerys Targaryen. Here, she shrinks herself. As Bea, she is tightly wound, bilingual, and pathologically polite. Watch her shoulders in the early episodes; they sit practically at her ears. She holds her body like someone apologizing for taking up space.

Richardson, meanwhile, operates on pure, messy instinct. If you only know her as the chaotic Gen-Z assistant Portia from *The White Lotus*, her work as Twila feels like a revelation. Twila is abrasive, impulsive, and carrying the psychic weight of a rough Indiana upbringing and a loveless marriage. When the two women first cross paths at a Soviet flea market—a scene where Twila aggressively negotiates a merchant down to save Bea from getting scammed—the dynamic snaps into place immediately. Twila is the hammer; Bea is the scalpel. Writing for the *Los Angeles Times*, critic Mary McNamara accurately noted that Fogel is "a master spinner of female friendship," and that’s exactly the engine driving the narrative.



There is a sequence in the fourth episode that I am still thinking about. It does not involve a shootout or a ticking clock. It's just the two women sitting in a cramped, nicotine-stained embassy office, realizing how little they actually knew about the men they married. The camera stays close, letting the silence hang. You can almost smell the stale coffee and cigarette smoke. The sound design drops out the ambient noise of the typewriter pool outside, isolating them in their shared disillusionment. It’s a quiet, devastating moment that grounds the pulpier spy antics in genuine human ache.

I will not pretend the series is without flaws. The back half of the season introduces a few too many side characters (though Adrian Lester brings a welcome, weary gravitas to his role as station chief). Sometimes the script seems to forget its own rules, rushing through espionage tradecraft that should logically take years to learn. Whether you buy into their sudden transformation into capable agents depends entirely on how much you enjoy watching them figure it out on the fly.



Ultimately, though, *PONIES* pulls it off because it understands that spycraft is fundamentally about performance. Bea and Twila were already lying every single day—pretending to be happy, pretending to be fulfilled, pretending their marriages were fine. The KGB is dangerous, sure. But for women who have spent their entire adult lives smiling through polite societal suffocations, going undercover is simply a lateral move.