Slow Horses Continues To Be the Best Spy Series You’ve Never Seen in Excellent Third Season

It’s no longer a secret that Apple TV+ is home to some of TV’s best shows. What its content library lacks in size—with no licensed programming, its collection of originals is likely smaller than the DVD section at your local public library—it makes up for in quality. Not every show is a gem, of course, but Apple has produced enough good-to-great series since its launch in late 2019 that writing the streaming platform off at this stage is foolish at best and ignorant at worst. Which is why, if you’ve yet to hop on the Apple train for whatever reason, you’re missing out. And if you have jumped on but have yet to enjoy the darkly funny espionage thriller Slow Horses, you really ought to rectify that.

Based on the book series by Mick Herron, the show is one of Apple’s best; it deserves the type of fanfare and awards recognition that Ted Lasso and Severance have both received, and it’s depressingly silly that, on the eve of the show’s third season, it continues to fly under the radar for many. The series follows a group of misfit MI5 agents who have been sent to Slough House, a kind of purgatory for disgraced members of the security service. Led by slovenly curmudgeon Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman)—a remnant of the Cold War era barely able to take care of himself but yet knows everything that’s happening around him—the Slow Horses, as they’re derided by the rest of MI5, find themselves tasked with the jobs that no one wants, only to manage to stumble into missions that have real stakes. 

As the third season opens, MI5’s Alison Dunn (Katherine Waterston) has stolen a classified file with the intention of leaking its contents to the public. Following a chase through the streets of Istanbul in which she’s pursued by her boyfriend and fellow agent Sean (Sope Dirisu), Alison is murdered by her contact, who makes her death look like suicide, setting off a story that turns the action inward and puts the secrets of MI5 under a microscope. It admittedly doesn’t sound all that thrilling on paper—we didn’t know Alison and thus have no emotional connection to her, and we also don’t know the contents of the file, why it matters, or what problems may come from leaking it. But that’s part of Slow Horses’ charm. It’s not your typical spy series. There aren’t massive action set pieces around every corner. This isn’t James Bond thwarting an evil mastermind. Hell, it’s not even Archer. The show takes a realistic approach to the genre, expertly depicting the mundanity of the security service and the legwork that goes into the job, all the while finding ways to ratchet up the tension from within that framework. 

When the action picks up a year after Alison’s death, the Slough House team is itemizing old MI5 records that are being moved to a decommissioned Cold War bunker for storage. It’s a thankless job, a punishment really, and everyone knows it, especially River Cartwright (Jack Lowden, who continues to be a compelling leading man and the perfect complement to Oldman). But when Slough House’s office administrator, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves), is kidnapped by a rogue group looking for the file that led to Alison’s death, the series quickly kicks into high gear as the team races against the clock to try to save Standish’s life. 

While Lamb reluctantly teams up with Roddy (Christopher Chung), the team’s obnoxious and self-centered hacker, to stage a rescue attempt, River finds himself breaking into MI5’s highly fortified headquarters to find the file in question, putting himself in the crosshairs of not just Duffy (Chris Reilly), the arrogant head of internal affairs, but also the formidable Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), MI5’s deputy director general and the only person who can seemingly match wits with Lamb. What quickly becomes clear as the various members of Slough House—including Rosalind Eleazar’s Louisa, Aimee-Ffion Edwards’ Shirley, and Kadiff Kirwan’s Marcus—attempt to put the pieces of this particular puzzle together, is that this mission is not what it seems, and each new layer that is pulled back only reveals several more rotten layers beneath it. 

Each season of Slow Horses feels like a direct response to the one that came before it, not necessarily in terms of plot or character arcs—each season more or less stands on its own, with some emotional and personal baggage carrying over—but as if the writers heard the various criticisms about the previous season and attempted to course correct with the next outing. The fact each season is an adaptation of a book in Herron’s series throws water on that theory, while Slow Horses’ production schedule makes that improbable, if not impossible. The first season aired in April 2022, while the second followed just eight months later in December. The third and fourth seasons, which were ordered together, were also filmed in relatively close succession. It’s far more likely, then, that the series is simply getting stronger as it ages, which is often the case as everyone finds their footing. While the first season’s kidnapping plot felt predictable and uninspired, the sophomore outing’s game of cat and mouse with the Russians upped the stakes dramatically. Although the plot sometimes felt a bit too convoluted, the undertaking of a more ambitious story made Slow Horses a better show. The third season now effectively dials back on some of the attempts at being too clever with a story that looks inward and keeps the action close to home, and it makes for an even more enjoyable viewing experience. 

But perhaps the best thing Slow Horses has going for it is its unique ability to inject humor into spy-craft (I guess in that way the show is like Archer). While there might be too many literal fart jokes, the writers never fail to find ways to make viewers laugh even as the stakes feel very real (never forget, this is a show that is brazenly unafraid to kill off characters to remind us of the dangerous nature of the game). Sometimes it’s black humor, sometimes it’s an unexpected Lord of the Rings reference at a dramatic moment, sometimes it’s a whispered comment under one’s breath. Whatever form the humor takes, the end result is a show with a well-balanced story that flies by as clues are uncovered, surprising motives are revealed, and the members of Slough House prove that they might be f–kups, but they’re not totally without merit. Slow Horses is an underdog story of the highest caliber. At this point, if you’re not on board, one has to wonder who the true f–kups are.

The first two episodes of Slow Horses Season 3 stream Wednesday, November 29th on Apple TV+, with new episodes airing weekly. 

Kaitlin Thomas is an entertainment journalist and TV critic. Her work has appeared in TV Guide, Salon, Gold Derby, and TV.com, among other places. You can find her tweets about TV, sports, and Walton Goggins @thekaitling.

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