Slow Horses
Cast & Key People
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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.
