It’s taken four seasons and this year’s Emmy (for writing) for American audiences to wake up to the exciting action, classy personnel, high polish and higher glee of Slow Horses, the British spy thriller series based on the Slough House novels of Mick Herron. It’s been, forgive me, a real dark horse in the streaming race.
What’s so great about it? Let’s start with the compressed joke of the deliberately obscure, dull-sounding name: the show has nothing to do with horses and is anything but slow.
In fact, the first scene of Season One, Episode One explodes out of the gate with a deliriously prolonged high-speed foot chase through a busy airport in pursuit of – what else? – a terrorist with a deadly backpack. This wild, inventive sprint ends in disaster for the agent in pursuit, River Cartwright (“Running Jack” Lowden), but not for the populace of London, since it turns out that we, along with the brass back at headquarters, have been watching nothing more than a fire drill.
For his failure in this grueling exercise, MI5 punishes our guy River by exiling him to Slough House, a grimy, off-site punishment unit overseen by a dilapidated Cold War agent-runner named Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman, having a glorious time). Thus River becomes one of the Slow Horses, casually cruel MI5 slang for a disparate crew of “shitheels and burnouts” consigned by the espionage gods to pointless busy-work (filing noise complaints by date, repacking old records in new boxes) until they either quit or somehow claw their way back up into the icy spy heaven of MI5 headquarters. Chagrin is the ruling mood of Slough House and baby-shit yellow is its hue. And yet it is the despised, beaten-down Slow Horses who repeatedly save the treacherous bureaucrats who rule them. (Saving the world is never an option.)
High-level, Carré-like-hero hipness
Even if the fact that Mick Jagger sings the theme didn’t alert you to the show’s level of hipness, you should at this point – roughly five minutes in – be starting to catch on to the type of fun on offer. That’s good, because catching on is the key to survival here.
Slow Horses wholly inhabits the fictional house built by John Le Carré, and a thorough familiarity with the contours and conventions of that thrilling, radically disillusioned world makes it that much tastier. Gary Oldman memorably played Le Carré’s hero, George Smiley, in the fine (if compacted) 2011 movie remake of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but the writer’s heirs reportedly did not care for his portrayal and said no to a subsequent production of Smiley’s People with Oldman reprising the role. He gets his own back, and more, in his turn as Jackson Lamb – a vision of old George gone to post-Brexit seed. Like Smiley, Lamb loathes the bosses, is always miles ahead of everyone else, has no life but the job, and effortlessly commands and cares for his people (his “Joes” in Le Carré-speak).
The charm lies in the differences. Lamb’s unspeakable raincoat is Alec Guiness’ drab Burberry in the great 1980s series, but filthy (with a nod to Columbo’s clean-enough rumple). Unlike Smiley, Lamb never showers, drinks heavily, frequently stinks up the room, and subjects everyone around him to withering, endlessly quotable verbal abuse. (He refers to one beat-up pair of agents as Scratch and Sniff. Just a sample.)
Thrills with a dose of humor (or humour)
Deft and exhilarating in pure thriller terms, Slow Horses is also extremely funny. It trades aurally in heartless British wisecracking and visually in extreme contrasts of high and low, juxtapositions of gleaming hi-tech temples and grotty, airless holes.
When Lamb, looking like a human dumpster, breezes past the maître d’ of an exquisite London restaurant to interrupt a cabinet minister’s lunch in Season 3, he’s so shockingly out of place that posh diners at a nearby table actually jump up in alarm. His occasional meet-ups with elegant, perpetually annoyed MI5 Second Desk Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) are funny even without the slashing dialogue.
Such is the show’s depth of bench that Thomas isn’t even the best-dressed, most toffee-nosed bitch at MI5 – that would be Sophie Okonedo, drummed out of the service at the end of Season 3, but, we hope, poised to return from the cold.
The generally rueful mood of contemporary Britain underlies everything. Discussing the conversion of the old agency headquarters into a high-end private hotel, Lamb remarks, “The detention cells are now massage suites. Still filled with Russians, ironically.”
An excellent, finely gauged cast
Performances are uniformly excellent and heartfelt – despite the comedy, there is no winking, no distance between us and the characters, many of whom we come to love. (Be warned that at least one person we like, or at least know well, dies violently in each season.)
The emotional calculus is finely gauged: the advancing dementia of one aged character (Jonathan Pryce) is an important plot point in Season 4 and underscores the theme of intelligence as a critical resource. His prickly confusion is played for both pathos and laughs, laughs that we don’t have to feel bad about because, however nice a grandpa he might be, he used to be yet another murderous higher-up, known to his spook subordinates as The Bastard.
The production quality of Slow Horses is plush and expert – gun-battles and chases are tip-top – but at points perhaps a bit too stylish. MI5 is color-keyed robin’s-egg blue, a tone that seeps out from clothing and interior walls to suffuse whole scenes in a way that I find cartoony. It has its effect though – this pretty hue becomes genuinely chilling as we move along, and we sigh with relief whenever the color-gradient reverts to dirty Slough House beige. In grease and filth and stink lies the only truth.
