Slow Horses

The Art of Failing Upward

I’ve always distrusted polished spy thrillers a little. You know the ones—perfect tailoring, miraculous hacks, martinis served with self-regard. Apple TV+'s *Slow Horses* (drawn from Mick Herron's novels) wants no part of that fantasy. This show seems to smell through the screen: stale whiskey, damp wool, old takeout. I was hooked almost immediately.



The setup is wonderfully cruel. MI5 agents who screw up don’t get fired; they get dumped in Slough House, a bureaucratic dead zone meant to humiliate them until they quit. Presiding over this heap of damaged goods is Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman. (Oldman has said he took the job because he was tired of years spent buried under prosthetics and elaborate accents—he wanted to play a man who looks like he sleeps in his clothes, and he absolutely delivers.) Look at how he carries himself. He slouches. He shuffles. He weaponizes his own flatulence. But behind the greasy hair and sagging eyelids, Lamb is watching everything. The brilliance of Oldman’s performance isn’t in big speeches. It’s in those tiny flashes of contempt or disappointment when someone states the obvious a beat too late.



One scene from the first season has stayed with me. River Cartwright—played by Jack Lowden with exactly the right amount of ambition outrunning competence—confronts Lamb over a conspiracy that might get them killed. The show doesn’t whirl the camera around or cut frantically to fake urgency. It just sits there and lets the sad little reality of the room do its work. Lamb noodles around in a carton of cold food, barely giving River the satisfaction of a full look. The editing moves at the same sluggish tempo as the institution itself, then suddenly snaps into violence the moment the outside world barges in. It’s a hard tonal trick to pull off. As *The Telegraph*'s Anita Singh observed around a recent season premiere, "There is a supreme sense of confidence about the way it is put together."



The show isn’t perfect. Some exposition dumps land with a thud; you can hear the gears turning in the script when it has too much plot to unload. I’m also not convinced every secondary villain leaves a mark. But *Slow Horses* gets something basic and ugly about modern life exactly right: the institutions we rely on are often run by people mainly concerned with hiding their own mistakes. It takes the myth of the noble spy and swaps in a much sadder, funnier truth about workplace incompetence. By the end of the latest season, it’s hard not to see it clearly: this is a workplace comedy in espionage clothing, and that makes it feel uncomfortably close to real life.