If a big budget, witty spy thriller led by Hollywood actors is your thing, there is no shortage to choose from right now. The last few weeks alone have seen Eddie Redmayne picking off rightwing politicians in The Day of the Jackal and Ben Whishaw shooting anyone who looks at him a bit funny in Black Doves. While both have been entertaining, neither can quite match the majestically worn charms, and occasional fart jokes, of sleeper hit Slow Horses.
It has taken four seasons for Slow Horses to become one of the most talked-about series on TV. It is odd that such an immediate show has proven to be a slow burn, but the attention is much deserved, because it has been excellent from the beginning. Some might say that it was more excellent at the beginning, but even Slow Horses on cruise control is one of the finest thrillers on television. Gary Oldman gives the performance of his career, and his CV is not exactly flimsy, as the aggressively flatulent Jackson Lamb. Lamb is an old-school spy whose more traditional methods have been sidelined in favour of a new, public-facing, out-of-the-shadows MI5 culture. But over four series, he has transformed into a man capable of near-superhero levels of espionage and combat, if only you give him time to finish his takeaway first.
Season four begins with intent, sending a suicide bomber to drive a car full of explosives into a shopping centre in the middle of London. It is reminiscent of the very first episode, in which River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) fumbles a training exercise at Heathrow, only this time it is no training exercise: there is a very real bomb. The attack sparks a chain of events that had been trailed since the beginning of Slow Horses, with Cartwright’s elderly grandfather David (Jonathan Pryce) posing the serious question of what happens when a man entrusted with the darkest of state secrets loses the cognitive capacity to keep them to himself.
The bombing instigates the mother of all cock-ups, too, which must, as always, be managed by Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas). Technically, she has been demoted to Second Chair, but we all know who the real First Chair is, particularly when the man actually in the hot seat is Claude (James Callis), a comically dim-witted government plant who apparently has no idea what is going on. Obviously it’s down to the renegades and misfits of Slough House, all theoretically decent spies who have a habit of sabotaging their own careers, to work out what is happening and how to stop it. The terrorist storyline spreads beyond the UK to France, to a bizarre conspiracy involving the politically motivated breeding of mercenaries, but not before faking a key character’s death and setting MI5’s “dogs” off on a desperately satisfying wild goose chase. Newcomer Ruth Bradley, playing a new chief dog who mistakenly thinks she has the measure of Lamb, is a welcome addition.
This may be Slow Horses’ most personal season yet. Certainly, the junior Cartwright is taken more seriously, and his relationships with both his grandfather and the eternally cynical Lamb are allowed a little more emotional heft. The snippy friendship between Shirley and Marcus, too, beds in, and when their equally poor decision-making comes back to bite one of them, it makes for one of those gut-churning moments that Slow Horses does so well. The against-all-odds mentality doesn’t always pay off.
Emotions aside, Slow Horses works because every time, it stubbornly continues to be Slow Horses. Lamb does his own thing, and Taverner reluctantly, eventually, goes along with it. It plays down the glamour of spying, while revelling in its own grimy glory. In an era of streaming bloat – which sounds like something Lamb might suffer with – it is lean, to-the-point and often very funny. There are no 90-minute mid-season episodes here, no drawn-out subplots that seem to exist to pad out the run length. What you see is not exactly what you get; this is spycraft, after all. But what you expect from Slow Horses is generous entertainment, and it continues to dish it up, in ample portions.