The Guardian ·
Slow Horses season six review – it gets harder to enjoy Gary Oldman’s spy thriller every year
The show’s creator has gone, it’s been retooled as a conventional thriller and it feels like it’s starting to run out of ideas – even if it’s as slick and confident as ever
This is a new Slow Horses: season six is the first not to be guided by Will Smith, a writer whose previous work on The Thick of It and Veep explained why this espionage saga had an unusually sharp comic tongue. The absence of Smith’s drollery is discernible in a more straight-faced new story, but the bigger problem is one of a creative work naturally eroding over time. Slow Horses is now old.
It’s always been a difficult, delicate proposition. The staff of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5 where misfits and screw-ups are given boring work when it would make more sense to just fire them, regularly outstrip supposedly elite spies despite being shambling losers. Leading the field agents is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who has the good looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but is also a brittle, luckless and rather whiny wretch, who regularly has to be saved from ignominious death. The jokes have helped us suspend our disbelief that River and the rest haven’t yet been riddled with bullets, and the relocation of traditional spy thrills to decaying urban settings is still a tonic, but enjoying this conjuring trick gets harder every year.
The crisis descended in season five, Smith’s last, with a flat story powered by generic terrorists delivering blowback for British crimes abroad. Slow Horses also began to suffer from the curse of the celebrated supporting character: when you know you have failsafe comic relief in your cast, the temptation to promote them can be irresistible, but they don’t always survive the exposure. That happened to showboating virgin Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), who had previously snarked from in front of his computer but was now given a pivotal role, in which he soon became unbearable. Even the star of the show, Gary Oldman, might have been better staying in the background as the physically disgusting but intellectually unbeatable Slough House boss, Jackson Lamb: he’s a brilliantly conceived and perfectly performed cartoon, but in season five he started to burn out.
