Catching Up With "Slow Horses"

This write-up covers the second and third series of "Slow Horses."  I watched the first one back in 2022, but never wrote a review for it.  I haven't revisited it since then, so I'm playing fair and leaving it out of this post.  However, so far each series has functioned pretty well as an individual piece of media, and you could easily watch them in isolation from each other.  And if you like British crime series or spy series, "Slow Horses" is definitely one to seek out.

Gary Oldman played spymaster George Smiley to perfection in the most recent film version of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," but the spy he'll likely be best remembered for is Jackson Lamb.  He's the head of Slough House, whose members have been nicknamed "slow horses."  This is the unit where the problem children of MI5 are banished, home to those who haven't erred seriously enough to be outright fired.  Its members include the screw-ups, the insubordinates, the addicts, and a few who have fallen through the cracks.  Lamb is a cynical, slovenly man of awful habits and worse hygiene, who has a long history in intelligence, and knows all the major players.  He is also secretly very good at his job, which is why Slough House keeps getting involved in stopping major threats to national security despite its reputation.

  

Oldman's performance is the main event, of course, with Lamb befouling the atmosphere and throwing zingers at everyone unlucky  enough to cross paths with him.  However, I like the whole ensemble.  The second lead is Jack Lowden, who plays River Cartwright, a former star agent and grandson of a famous spy (Jonathan Pryce), whose flair for heroics tends to go wrong.  He badly wants out of Slough House, but keeps getting into one catastrophe after another.  Other members of the team include ex-alcoholic administrator Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), formidable field agent Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar), family man Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan), spitfire drug addict Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and sleazy techie Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung).  Their bosses include the totally amoral MI5 leaders Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo), and MP Peter Judd (Samuel West).

I like that "Slow Horses" offers a little of everything.  Based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, the tone is darkly comedic, but the spy adventure elements are solid.  We get plenty of twisty John LeCarre power plays and conspiracies to untangle, and major characters are killed off with surprising regularity.  At the same time, the show has been steadily increasing the number of raucous James Bond-style action sequences, with the third series climaxing in a protracted gun battle.  Physical humor and pratfalls are not uncommon, though deployed with care, so as not to undercut the thrills.  Though our heroes can be counted on to do the right thing, and can be surprisingly competent in a pinch, they're also prone to making bad calls and being easy marks.  Cartwright has all the making of being a great spy, except that he takes things at face value too quickly, and is thus easy to manipulate.  Up against half the cast of "The Darkest Hour," he's totally outclassed, and it's such fun to watch him flounder. 

It was also a pleasant surprise to discover that the show is managing to deliver a full series yearly, with the sixth one due this year.  Also, six hour-long episodes is a perfectly good length to cover a novel's worth of material.  So far, each series has ended with a preview for the next one, and there are enough "Slough House" books still coming out that "Slow Horses" could easily run to the end of the decade adapting them all.  This depends on Gary Oldman sticking around, of course, and thankfully he seems to be having a very good time being very awful as Jackson Lamb.  

Keep an eye out for write-ups of the remaining series soon, because they're not going to last me very long at the rate I've been watching them.  

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