Originally, I hadn’t planned on adding Apple TV+ to my collection of streaming services. While they proposed a few films and television programs that interested me the lack of any back catalog made the service less than appealing. However, after a year of free access for buying a new computer, I have found that there is more than enough content to justify the affordable price and among that content if the series Slow Horses.

Adapted from the espionage novel of the same name by Mick Herron Slow Horses centers on

Apple TV+

Slough House a division of MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence service, where disgraced, burnt-out, and embarrassing officers are sent to wait out their careers performing pointless, mindless, and route tasks far from the bright and shinning center of Britain’s spy service.

The Leper Colony of intelligence officers newest addition is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), grandson of a legendary officer, but River has disgraced his family name with a disastrously bad terrorist training exercise and is now exiled to Slough House where he answers to Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) an apparent drunk and burn-out.

When Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), MI5’s Director of Operations, has a false flag operation go spectacularly badly endangering the nephew of Pakistani general, she sets up Slough House to take the blame for her operation. Cartwright, Lamb, and the other misfits derogatorily called Slow Horses, must not only outwit Taverner and reveal the truth of her operation but must rescue the kidnapped nephew before fascist nativists murder him.

Slow Horses is much closer to John le Carre’s fiction that to Ian Fleming’s super spy stories, though in addition to the gritty, grimy, and dirty world of killers and spies, Slow Horses adds office humor and humanity to the bottom barrel officers trying to do the right thing. With five of the six episodes released, Slow Horses has very nearly reached its conclusion in adapting the first novel. The acting to superior, particularly Oldman’s portrayal of Lamb, a man who has seen too much of the worst of humanity but still harbors a strong sense of right and wrong hidden within a flatulent disguise. The production design is spot on with sharp contrasts between ‘the palace’ MI5’s modern steel, glass, and cyber enhanced headquarters and dirty, broken, and drab building that is the home to cast offs of Slough House.

Apple has already produced a second season of Slow Horses coming late 2022 and I for one am up for it.