The streaming services, particularly Netflix (with The Night Agent) and Amazon (with Mr. And Mrs. Smith), have clearly been attempting to outdo each other with addictive espionage shows. Apple TV+, however, has scored the same audience (and Dad TV addicts) with a subversive option with Slow Horses.
The bingeable show stars Gary Oldman as a failed and cantankerous spymaster, Jackson Lamb, who also happens to fart. A lot. Lamb leads a group of British intelligence f*ck-ups who have been relegated to Slough House, which is where inept agents go to serve out career purgatory. The show is a refreshing change-up from polished, suit-wearing spies who are impeccably groomed and sip martinis (shaken, not stirred, obviously) in between daring mission phases while looking impossibly sexy. The series is such a hit that it’s already been renewed for a fifth season (a remarkable feat on a still-fledgling streaming service, which launched in fall 2019), but we’re only here to talk about the fourth installment, so let’s get down to bumbling business.
Plot
Slow Horses adapts Mick Herronthe’s Slough Horses, which makes pun-filled reference to Slough House, where days are intended to be drudge-filled, dull, and overall miserable. These agents, as already mentioned, have sh*t the bed on previous important missions, so they are intended to perform rote administrative tasks that won’t screw up anything important while enduring Lamb as a boss. However, that’s not how the stories go down in this series, in which these agents somehow get pulled into vital missions of the utmost importance to Britain.
In the third season finale, Lamb fabulously boobytrapped a hostage house during an especially chaotic episode that ends with River having acquired the “Footprint” file, which is seemingly destroyed near the end of the episode by River’s grandfather. However, River possessed the foresight to make copies of the secret classified file, and we are left to wonder what he will do with information that could severely damage MI5, so that will be a fine mess that will surely continue unfurling in the fourth season.
Those episodes will be (conveniently) based upon Herron’s fourth book, Spook Street, in the series. This novel picks up with River wrestling over his ex-Cold War-era spy grandfather’s descent into dementia, but there’s not much opportunity to dwell upon the situation because the dysfunctional Slough House agents must work to protect the British public (yep, oh boy) after a terror attack upon a busy shopping center.
Cast
In addition to Oldman, the show’s cast includes Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Olivia Cooke, Rosalind Eleazar, Saskia Reeves, Steven Waddington, Paul Higgins, and Jonathan Pryce.
Release Date
Apple TV+ has been fairly rapid fire on production with Season 1 arriving in April 2022, Season 2 in December 2022, and Season 4 in November 2023. With that said, Season 4 should be with us before year’s end.
Trailer
No trailer yet, man, but if you’d like to see Gary Oldman talk about James Bond’s lack of farting prowess, then you’re in luck: