The fourth season of Apple's espionage thriller sends Jackson Lamb and his band of disgraced spies into the murky world of Cold War legacies, proving once again that the best spy show on television is also the funniest.
“If you are not watching Slow Horses, you are missing the best spy thriller since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Gary Oldman is magnificent, the writing is impeccable, and at six episodes per season, there is not a wasted moment.”
Slow Horses has achieved something remarkable: it has become the most reliably excellent show on television without anyone quite noticing. Each six-episode season adapts one of Mick Herron's Slough House novels with surgical precision, and Season 4, based on Spook Street, may be the best yet.
Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb remains one of the great television characters, a flatulent, whisky-soaked genius who masks genuine tactical brilliance behind a wall of deliberate offensiveness. This season gives Lamb a personal stake when a bombing investigation leads back to his own past, and Oldman responds with moments of vulnerability that make the character's usual cruelty land with new force.
The supporting cast continues to deepen. Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner is the show's secret weapon, a bureaucratic antagonist whose competence makes her more threatening than any terrorist. Jack Lowden and Saskia Reeves bring quiet devastation to subplots that would be throwaway moments on lesser shows. Slow Horses understands that espionage is not about gadgets and explosions but about compromised people making impossible choices in badly lit rooms.
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