Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Slow Horses’ On Apple TV+, Where Gary Oldman Leads A Unit Of Screw-Up Spies

Gary Oldman is one of those actors who buries himself in any role he plays, whether it’s Dracula or Winston Churchill. You’re never looking at “Oscar winner Gary Oldman” when he plays a role; you’re looking at whoever he’s personifying. In the new series Slow Horses, Oldman disappears into the slovenly, grouchy Jackson Lamb, the head of a unit of MI5 outcasts.

SLOW HORSES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man impatiently waiting at an airport gate. He’s wearing an earpiece and nervously tapping his passport against his leg.

The Gist: River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is an MI5 agent, and he’s at that airport gate to track a target who is supposed to receive a backpack bomb during a handoff. The operation is led by Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), one of the agency’s top directors. River is given intelligence by his colleague James Webb (Freddie Fox) that the target has a blue shirt and white tee, and he chases that man down, knocking over travelers in his way.

But when that yields nothing, he’s told that the target has a white shirt and blue tee. Taverner tells him to stand down but he crosses the tarmac to catch up with the target, and basically breaks the arm of a cop in his way, right in time for the target to detonate his bomb in front of him, right as a train pulls into the station by the airport.

Sometime later, we see a man with holes in his socks farting himself awake in his office. He’s Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), who runs an MI5 outpost not-so-affectionally nicknamed “Slough House” in the agency. It’s not actually in Slough; in fact, it’s not far from MI5’s headquarters, but it might as well be in Slough. It’s an office full of agents who have messed up their careers in one way or another, including River. They mostly do the grunt work that the agents at headquarters don’t want to do, like look through the garbage of a right-wing journalist they’re investigating.

Lamb takes every chance he can to remind river that, even though he messed up a training exercise, if it were real life, a lot of people would have died. He also likes to remind River that if it weren’t for his well connected grandfather, David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), he would have been booted out of the agency.

There are competent agents there, like Sid Baker (Olivia Cooke), who is tasked with getting information from a flash drive the journalist carries with his laptop. There also seems to be some banter between her and River. She puts the info from the flash drive on an MI5 laptop which is put in a “flash box,” which flashes and burns a person if it’s broken into.

Because Sid stepped out, Lamb reluctantly sends River to drop it off at HQ… to Webb, of all people; River thinks “Spider”, as he calls Webb, sandbagged him with bad intel. Before handing it over, though, he breaks into the flash box and grabs the data from the laptop, which turns out to be a decoy. In the meantime, a young Muslim student is abducted by right-wing extremists, bent on forcing all immigrants to leave the UK.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though Slow Horses is about government agents and not criminals, it still has the “Island of Misfit Toys” vibe of shows like Misfits or Leverage.

Our Take: What’s inherently appealing about Slow Horses is that misfit vibe we mention just above. The series, adapted from Mick Herron’s novel by writer Will Smith (no, not the slappy Oscar winner), may have an intriguing case at its center, but we didn’t see any evidence of that in the first episode. The series is going to ride on the characters populating Slough House, starting with Oldman as the super-crusty Lamb.

We have no idea how Lamb got into the position to lead this ragtag team; perhaps we’ll find that out as the season goes along. But Oldman leans into Lamb’s crustiness with all of his copious acting abilities. On the surface, he seems like a slob and an asshole, but there’s a reason why he’s an asshole, and that’s because he has no desire to see his charges stuck at Slough for their whole careers.

When Lamb sees River and Sid in the office late at night, he says, “If I find out you are indulging in extracurricular activities that upset the equilibrium of this blessed sanctuary, then I will make it so you wish you were in a Siberian gulag.” The way Oldman reads that sentence betrays both Lamb’s inherent laziness but also his grumpy desire to make sure his “fuck ups” aren’t his forever.

We don’t know a ton about the rest of the team and what led them to Slough House. Lamb’s second-in-command, Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) is shown at an AA meeting, and she flashes back to when she found her husband’s bloody body in the bathroom; it’s likely the reason why she barely tolerates both her boss and the rest of the team. It’s obvious that Sid, like River, has some skills and is likely there for extreme reasons. But the other members of the crew — Louisa Guy (Rosalind Eleazar) Min Harper (Dustin Demri-Burns), Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) and Struan Loy (Paul Higgins) — are just defined by quips in the dusty office. We hope to get to know them better as the series goes along.

But there’s already a feeling that, as the case of right-wing xenophobic terrorists continues, the case will take a back seat to how River, eager to prove he was screwed over and deserves another shot, goes rogue and investigates on his own, as well as the abilities of the rest of the crew. And in a show with so many personalities, that’s just fine with us.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: After watching the video of the abduction victim, Lamb pushes them out of the computer room saying “you’ve all got papers to shuffle.” Then he asks, “Where the fuck is River Cartwright?” River is outside, determinedly walking to work on the case on his own.

Sleeper Star: You don’t cast Kristin Scott Thomas in a role and just have her bark orders. She’s involved in the story in some way, whether it’s a connection to Lamb or some other way.

Most Pilot-y Line: A friend of the abducted man is shown doing standup comedy, and it’s pretty lame stuff.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Slow Horses has a bit of a generic case at its center, and it feels like some members of the Slough House team get short shrift, at least at first. But Oldman’s presence elevates our interest in just how everyone who works at Slough House actually got there.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.