Why a fictional band of broken British spies has become the most human show on television
Some television series arrive with glossy production values and the unmistakable polish of a major marketing push. Slow Horses, now one of the quiet triumphs of Apple TV+, does the opposite. Its world smells faintly of ashtrays, old curry, and the stale sigh of a bureaucracy that has given up on itself. And yet it has become one of the most affecting, most addictive dramas now running.
Adapted from the Slough House novels by Mick Herron, the series unfolds not in Westminster’s postcard London but in the scuffed geometry of Aldersgate and Clerkenwell. These are the streets around the Barbican, where concrete towers and gray light form a permanent climate. Slough House itself sits on Aldersgate Street, a shabby building inhabited by MI5 agents who have made career-ending errors but remain too skilled—or too troublesome—to fire outright. Its lack of glamour is part of its magnetism.
Fans regularly describe Slow Horses as the “anti-spy spy show.” Viewer comments echo the admiration: “There’s no glamour,” one wrote, “just damaged people, bad lighting, and the occasional miracle.” Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb—profane, rumpled, brilliant—is the gravitational force around which the misfits orbit. “You wouldn’t want him in your department,” another viewer noted, “but you can’t stop watching him do his job.”
What elevates the series is the way its humor, dry as chalk dust, suddenly gives way to genuine emotional weight. The stakes arrive quietly. One longtime reader of Herron’s novels put it simply: “It’s a show about failure—not erasing it, but living with it.” In that uneasy tension between bleak comedy and bruised humanity lies the show’s particular charge.
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| London's Aldersgate deserves an Emmy for Best Location |
The geography matters. Slough House’s exterior, filmed in Aldersgate near the Barbican’s Brutalist arcades, offers a London rarely romanticized. Locals recognize the mood: the drizzle, the bus fumes, the corners where a career might be forgotten. One London viewer remarked, “It looks like the place where hope goes to die, and that’s why I root for them.” The setting is not merely backdrop; it is a character—drab, stubborn, and perfectly suited to the story.
Mick Herron, the author behind the novels, is not a former spy. He worked for years in the publishing world after studying at Oxford. His eye for office politics, institutional pettiness, and the quiet despair of wasted talent informs every page. Not all spies make good writers or tale tellers. This series is a creation of a non-spy. It shows that and all for the better.
Apple TV+ has already committed to Season 6, with Season 7 in development.
Based on the show’s reliable timetable, Season 6 is expected to arrive in the fall of 2026, likely adapting Herron’s novel Joe Country. Viewers can expect more of the show’s signature blend of wit, weariness, loyalty under strain, and the occasional, unlikely act of courage from people who long ago abandoned the idea of heroism.
In an era awash in glossy universes and effortless fantasy, Slow Horses remains devoted to chipped paint, bad coffee, and the stubborn dignity of flawed people. It demonstrates that even in the dimmest corner of Aldersgate, perseverance can be its own kind of triumph. Or, as Jackson Lamb might phrase it—if he had the patience—every screwup gets a turn eventually.
And in metaphor land Slow Horses is a show Americans have danced around for decades and failed to deliver. The Brits admit there are class divisions as personified by actors Gary Oldham and Kristin Thomas. Yanks pretend everyone is equal. In a word, Slow Horses succeeds because of its honesty.
