Spies Like Us
Why Slow Horses is the perfect spy drama for the times we live in
Apple TV does an absolutely terrible job of promoting anything that isn’t Ted Lasso, so it’s quite possible that you’ve never heard of Slow Horses, let alone caught any of its five seasons. If you’re feeling exhausted by recent world events and wondering where the hell all the intelligent people went, this may be the perfect time for you to put this on your watch list.
Slow Horses is about Slough House, the station where MI-5’s least capable agents go to fade into insignificance. The cast shifts a bit from season to season, but everyone manning the desks of the grubby office is one flavor of screwup or another. One’s an alcoholic, another left a classified folder on a train, one has a gambling problem, and so on. The two constants are River Cartwright, whose penchant for self-sabotage borders on genius, and Head of Station Jackson Lamb, who’s generally sick of everything and everyone and who doesn’t seem to have done laundry since the Thatcher administration. River thinks he’s too good for Slough House, and Lamb gets a cheap thrill out of regularly reminding him that if that were true, he’d still be at Regent Park, where MI-5’s star agents shine.
Each season of Slow Horses handles a different overarching mystery that the losers of Slough House help solve. They never get credit, they almost always succeed by accident, and they often suffer some kind of indignity or loss in the process. This is not a well-oiled machine, or a collection of scruffy-but-lovable underdogs who gel as a team because they love and respect each other. They can barely stand to be in the same room together most of the time, truth be told. They don’t really have much to be happy about or look forward to. Lamb berates them constantly, even when they win. The words “well done” will only ever escape his lips if he’s ordering a steak. They are, by and large, a miserable group of assholes.
Why, then, do I suggest this is the spy show we need right now? The world, as you may have noticed, already sucks and is full of misery, so why am I telling you allow a collection of unhappy jerks into your home for an hour at a time? Because the reason Lamb and River and Ho and Shirley and Standish and Lousia and all the other Slow Horses keep showing up to that dingy office with the door that sticks is because they genuinely care. Even now, when it is clear that their fate is to ride out their time as the agency’s joke squad, they continue to show up and try to make the world better. Safer. Less shitty. Most of the time, they get slapped and told to mind their place, but they try anyway. And it’s the trying that matters.
Lamb is a misanthrope who makes life miserable for everyone around him as much as he can, but he’s also a brilliant agent. One of the best to ever work for MI-5, in fact, and everyone knows it, including the people currently in charge. He’s experienced enough to be First Desk of Regent Park, but can’t be arsed to play politics because he knows there is right and there is wrong and which one wins the day has very little to do with anything other than the agendas of people who live in very big houses. He’s incredibly smart, extremely capable, but he is, more than anything else, tired. Tired of politics, tired of pettiness, tired of people in power putting their own agends before the people they’re supposed to be protecting. He’s fucking over it.
He is, in other words, all of us who are exhausted by the pettiness and myopia that seem to be preventing huge swathes of people from actually fixing anything.
Lamb still cares, but has been around long enough to know that it doesn’t matter. Those in power will do what they always do, which is protect their own interests. The best he can manage is maybe make it so that not too many people get hurt as a result. And that’s a big maybe. The other joes of Slough House still think it’s possible to win, but Lamb knows that most of the time the best you’re going to do is not lose by too much.
There are lots of different kinds of spy stories, but typically, the hero at the heart of them has a burning sense of duty, or justice, or love of country. And those are great — who doesn’t love a bit of James Bond, a little Jack Bauer, a smattering of Jason Bourne? (Yes, they’re all JBs, isn’t that interesting?) Jackson Lamb isn’t aspirational, but he is recognizable. And for me, at least, his growing irritation at the global loss of common fucking sense is highly validating.
All five seasons of Slow Horses are currently streaming on Apple TV, and a sixth season is on the way.