Slow Horses
Our Review
The best spy show on television — and after five seasons of evidence, that’s not a controversial statement. Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, the flatulent, unwashed, savant-grade head of MI5’s dumping-ground department, is one of the great TV characters of the decade: a man who plays the fool because it’s the only honest costume left. Season six adapts Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels six and seven, sending the team on the run — hunted by their own service, with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) at her most morally ambiguous. The show’s formula is bulletproof: bureaucratic satire crossed with genuine espionage stakes, laugh-out-loud squalor one minute, a sudden burst of real violence the next. What elevates it beyond competent thriller-craft is its thesis — that institutions protect themselves first and people last, and the misfits are the only ones who keep count. Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright has grown from fall-guy to the show’s emotional core, and the slow reveal of Lamb’s history is one of TV’s best-managed long games. If you’ve been waiting to start: start. Six seasons in, it has never had a bad episode.