Apple TV’s British spy thriller Slow Horses simply delivers

polygon.com:

“What if a hyper-competent fictional archetype was actually just bad at their job?” is a tried and trusted setup. It’s usually mined for broad comedy: Think of Rowan Atkinson’s terrible James Bond spoof, Johnny English. It’s an easy route into parody, and the bathos and sight gags come naturally when your super-spy, or your vampire hunter, or your detective, is actually just a doofus.

Slow Horses, a new British spy drama streaming on Apple TV Plus, puts a different spin on it. These spies aren’t idiots, necessarily. But they are fuck-ups. Maybe they drink too much, maybe they don’t have the nerves for it, maybe they made one unforgivable mistake. Maybe they’re just mediocre. They’re not bad enough to give the sack, but not good enough to give anything important to do.

Rather than mine this situation for workplace comedy, Slow Horses thrusts its unlikely heroes into a fairly straight espionage thriller and asks them to keep up. Sometimes the results are funny, undercutting the pomposity of the genre. And sometimes they’re pretty sharp.

Slow Horses is a fairly close adaptation of the 2010 spy novel of the same name by Mick Herron, the first in Herron’s “Slough House” series about a crew of underachieving spies in MI5, the domestic arm of the British intelligence services. Herron has written 10 more books in the series, so if Apple TV Plus decides it wants to go back to the well, it has plenty of material to draw on. Herron combines robust thriller plots with a sardonic, humorous tone and a John Le Carré-style fascination with the political treachery and practical tradecraft of the secret intelligence world. And Apple’s deep pockets have brought two big stars to the series: Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas.

Slow Horses