The anti-James Bond that gets to the heart of Britishness

With a new series starting today, Apple TV+’s spy show about MI5 dropouts is more popular than ever, and like Mick Herron’s books, it has a lot to say about Britain today.

In the words of the Mick Jagger-penned theme song, the show is about “losers, misfits and drinkers,” but it’s a total triumph. Apple TV+’s “Slow Horses” has been a huge hit with audiences and critical acclaim. Based on the Mick Herron series of novels, the show only premiered in April 2022 but was quickly recognized as a standout on the streaming service, currently airing its fourth season, which premieres today. The third season has been nominated for numerous awards at next weekend’s Emmy Awards., The fifth film has already been shot.

The “Slow Horses” of the title are the failed MI5 agents grazing in Slough House, which Heron describes in the original as an “administrative prison,” hence their nickname. Slough House is “like a prison,” says Syd Baker (Olivia Cooke), a prisoner there in season one. “Don’t ask me what they’re being held for.” These spies have either failed in their missions, struggled with addictions to drink, drugs or gambling, or, in the case of one of them, are simply so obnoxious that no one can stand to be near them. They are now serving their sentences in rundown offices, where the sound of a broom banging on the floor is the closest thing to the internal communication system. They all yearn to return to “The Park,” as MI5’s fictional headquarters in Regent’s Park, London, is known, but none of them have returned. It is the job of Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), head of Slough House, to get MI5’s rejects to quit. MI5 would rather get them to quit than fire them.

The heart of the show is Oldman’s Oscar-winner’s brilliantly unvain performance as Lamb. Jackson Lamb has elevated scruffy humanity to an art form. His unkempt, thinning hair, untrimmed by a barber, hasn’t been washed in months. His clothes look stuck together with stains; his socks are more holes than hoses. He farts with pride, and watching him eat is a chilling, cosmic horror. He smokes constantly, drinks heavily, and his body odor is… not great. It’s hard to imagine a character further removed from the iconic spy of print and screen. James Bondsmart, sophisticated, attractive to the ladies. And he’s no George Smiley. John le Carré Oldman plays the silent master spy in the 2011 film “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

But despite appearances, Ram is tough, intelligent and extremely capable. Said about him He “must have been Bond or Smiley or some kind of hero at one point in his life, and then he understood it all and rebelled against it and became who he is now. He’s not actually the opposite, he just came through the other side.” His boss, the ruthless Deputy Director of MI5, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), is as well-groomed as Lamb, and both dislikes and respects him.

Lamb torments his staff with harsh, sarcastic comments and thinks they’re useless idiots – or so he professes. “I didn’t mean to kill them,” one of his agents tells Lamb after mistakenly eliminating an intruder at Slough House. “Of course I didn’t mean to kill them. If I did, they’d still be alive,” Lamb sneers. But his disdain may be disguised for professional reasons. “Oh, you really do care about them,” Tavanner tells Lamb.

Author and journalist Helen Lewis, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a fan of the book and the show, said, “Slough House is an odd family. Jackson Lamb can be rude to the Slough Horses, but he also defends them above all else.”

“Lam is a fascinating character. Though he’s a spy, his situation will be relatable to many viewers. He’s good at his job but he’s trapped in a ridiculous bureaucracy that ruins everything. He secretly gives his boss the middle finger, which many will want to do.”

Slow Horses blends laugh-out-loud funny black comedy with gripping drama and thrilling action scenes. Thanks to a great cast (including Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, and Rosalind Eleazar) and sharp writing, we care about the Slow Horses as much as Lamb. Heron’s complete lack of sentimentality about killing off popular characters (he planned to blow up Slough House at the end of the first novel, but changed his mind while writing) creates a real sense of crisis. At the beginning of a season or novel, it’s never guaranteed that our favorites will survive to the end. Season 4 is no exception. The first episode is one of the show’s best so far, featuring a terrorist attack, a shocking murder, and some great jokes from Jackson Lamb. A new First Desk, a new leader of the charming Dogs, and one of the Slow Horses goes on a trip abroad.

The show stays largely faithful to the book. Herron began writing detective novels while working as a copy editor for a legal brief publishing company, then turned to spy novels after the 2005 London bombings. The novels struggled to sell; “Slow Horses” “quickly fell into the realm of failure,” Herron says. He told BBC Radio 4.Things started to look up when the small US publisher of his second novel, Dead Lions, submitted it to the prestigious CWA Gold Dagger Award, which it won; the novel has now sold over three million copies.

Heron was never a spy (or so he’d say, but wouldn’t he?), but the world he created has depth, and it feels entirely plausible that spies might have personal vendettas or their operations might be compromised by internal conflicts. Even the technical terms feel real: MI5’s brutal internal security operatives, often used as muscle, are “dogs”, the agency’s deputy head is the “second desk”, and agents in the field are “Joes”, borrowed from le Carré.

Another reason for its success is Apple TV+’s willingness to spend money. In one episode, one of the Slow Horses, Roddy Ho (Christopher Chan), purposely crashes a double-decker bus into the wall of a farmhouse. It was expensive to film, didn’t advance the story one bit, and could have been easily cut — most production companies would have done it — but the scene was left in because it provided a series of funny lines.

The book and show are critical of the British status quo, of which there is undoubtedly something rotten. Slow Horses is set in a London of dingy takeaways, dodgy pubs, and rubbish-filled bin bags littering the streets. Heron’s Britain is deeply dysfunctional; it reeks of incompetence, extremism, and failure at every turn.

Writer Amanda Craig says: “Mick Herron is not only one of the few members of the small but struggling tribe satirising the decline and fall of post-war Britain, but he is undoubtedly its most successful writer. The rest of us are Charles DickensHeron puts the emphasis on the atmosphere of Bleak House – his semi-grotesque band of hopeless failures, the physically dreary conditions of Slough House, and his brutal portrayal of our national corruption, inertia, politics and bureaucracy – and combines it with a stylish, meticulously plotted series of thrillers.

“Through his brilliantly individualised band of failed spies, he dramatises the feelings of many essentially decent but deeply frustrated ordinary Englishmen who find themselves up against the machinations of a cynical and largely untouchable elite. It’s brilliantly entertaining and scathingly critical at the same time.”

Lewis points out: “Slough House itself is a rundown set of offices in central London, the polar opposite of the slick intelligence HQ we see in the movies, while Regent’s Park, where the ‘real’ spies are based, is shiny and high-tech. These two places are powerful symbols of how Britain wants to see itself, and how faded our glory actually is.”

One criticism the show sometimes gets is that each season is too short. It’s not a criticism that’s often levelled at; six episodes is bound to leave fans wanting more. But Chung told the BBC: “Given the amount of content out there right now, I think it’s really incredible that you can develop a story in six episodes and do it efficiently and compellingly. Why blow it up to eight when you can do a great thing in six?”

“We watched the first episode of Season 4 at a preview screening and I was speechless at how much was packed into 45 minutes. There are so many different story threads, so many different character journeys to follow, and they’re all unfolded incredibly well. No story thread feels inferior to any other, which I think is very difficult to do.”

“‘Slow Horses’ is on the rise. It’s almost like it’s riding a ‘Breaking Bad’ wave of momentum and people are starting to discover it and go back and watch the beginning, which is really exciting.”

It’s rare for a TV show to last five seasons these days. How long will it last? There are eight novels, with another one due to be published this year, and several short stories. Oldman said He said he was happy to play Ram for as long as he was needed and that he planned to retire when the show finished. He told the Watch Podcast He finds his collaboration with the team creating the show inspiring and energizing, and in a show of great faith in his work, Apple TV+ recently announced they would be producing the first novel in a detective series starring private investigator Zoe Bohm, “Down Cemetery Road.” There are all signs that Slow Horses will be able to keep running.

The first two episodes of Slow Horses Season 4 debut on Apple TV+ today, with new episodes releasing weekly.