Why ‘Slow Horses’ Is the Best Show on Streaming

Plus: A xeno-assignment.

Gary Oldman in ‘Slow Horses’

Some big news in the world of streaming this week, as a trailer dropped for the fourth season of Slow Horses. You can watch it here:

Slow Horses is really quite brilliant. Gary Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, the head of much-loathed unit of the British spy service MI5 comprised of misfits and outcasts who couldn’t hack it elsewhere in the spy world. But Lamb’s wry wariness and Cold War training make him invaluable to his higher-ups, and they keep solving cases no one else seems capable of doing. Also: Oldman farts a lot. (Trust me, it’s funny.)

AppleTV+ is, pound for pound, the best streaming service out there. I’m very excited for the Vince Vaughn-starring Bad Monkey, which debuted this week. Ted Lasso, of course, is a bona fide hit for the service (though those are relatively rare for the streamer), and I think Mythic Quest is one of the few great shows about the tech-era boom and its silly self-mythologizing aside from HBO’s Silicon Valley. Physical and Dark Matter were entertaining (I’m curious to see if we’ll get a second season of the latter); I really need to watch For All Mankind, about which I’ve heard great things.

And I haven’t even mentioned Severance, which might be my favorite of AppleTV+’s offerings. I liked the show so much I plunked down $60 (plus tax and shipping!) on the special edition LP with music from the show released by Mondo. (You can still pick up a copy of your own here, if you’re so inclined.) If you haven’t watched Severance, you really should: Adam Scott stars as a guy who has messed with his brain in a way that allows him to completely separate his work day from his personal life. It’s work-life balance taken to the extreme: His “innie” (that is, working) self knows nothing of his “outie” (that is, personal) life. The innie just wakes up and works, a sort of endless torment and drudgery, which the outie does not know about. Needless to say, this doesn’t make his outie existence particularly happy.

Anyway, this is a very truncated description—I don’t want to say much more than that for spoiler reasons—and I strongly recommend checking the whole show out. Scott is great, of course, but so are John Turturro and Christopher Walken and Patricia Arquette and Britt Lower and Zach Cherry. I can’t wait for the show to come back in January.

But wait we all have. I noted on Twitter that between the finale of the first season of Severance and the debut of the second season of Severance, we’ll have gotten all four seasons (so far!) of Slow Horses. (Luckily Ben Stiller, executive producer and the director of several episodes in addition to the brilliant Tropic Thunder and Zoolander, took my tweet in good humor.) But this is by no means solely a Severance problem.

There was a nearly two-year gap between the end of the first season of HBO’s The House of the Dragon and the beginning of that show’s second season, a delay that made it hard to remember just which of the white-haired loon was which and which bannermen belonged to which great house. The Mandalorian waited nearly two-and-a-half years between the second and third seasons* (though The Book of Boba Fett, which debuted between them, served as a season 2.5 of sorts). Netflix’s Squid Game dropped its whole first season on September 17, 2021, and won’t return until December 26. And don’t even get me started on Stranger Things, the final season of which won’t drop until 2025. The show debuted in the middle of 2016, meaning that it will have taken nearly a decade to produce just 42 episodes of the program. That’s wild, particularly given that the passage of time really matters when dealing with child actors.

Now look, maybe it doesn’t make sense to expect a season of TV every year; the streamers aren’t slaves to the up-fronts or traditional television schedules. In the age of streaming—and in the age of big-budget TV, where episodes cost as much as a movie and often require Marvel-level special effects—perhaps it makes more sense to wait until everything’s just perfect.

But that’s another reason why Slow Horses is so damn impressive. Kudos to showrunner Will Smith for maintaining a high level of excellence while also churning out a season per year. You love to see it.

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Make sure to check out today’s episode of Across the Movie Aisle, as we’re discussing the Olympics, which seem to have been a big success (so long as you aren’t a Republican Senator demanding Kamala Harris’s husband whine more about the opening ceremony). If you’re not a member yet, sign up here!

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Links!

This week I reviewed Alien: Romulus, which I thought was kind of effective and also weirdly self-contradictory, thematically. You’ll have to read the whole thing to understand why, as it’s kind of a big spoiler. So maybe see the movie, then read my review. Or just read my review if you aren’t worried about spoilers. Some of you still exist!

This piece about Awards Daily’s Sasha Stone is kind of weird (does anyone really care if an Oscar blogger goes MAGA?), but I have always been fascinated by the world of Oscar blogging, the rise of which was, I think, mirrored in some ways by the rise of the nerd-blogging outfits like Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool News. Flip sides of the same hype coin. And I think the whole film industry—or, at least, how we talk about them and think about them—kind of lives in the shadow of the world these two intellectual ecosystems constructed. But that’s a subject for a whole book.

Huge congrats to Brad Thor, whose Shadow of Doubt debuted at number three on the NYT fiction bestsellers list this week. Listen to my chat with Brad on last week’s BGTH here. And buy his book here!

James Cameron wants people complaining about the transfers on his recent 4K releases of True Lies, Aliens, and The Abyss to shut up. And I will not, good sir. I will not shut up.

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Assigned Viewing: Aliens (Max/Hulu)

‘Aliens’ (MovieStillsDB)

I will not shut up because I love Aliens! Great movie, with a great performance by Sigourney Weaver and a great villain in Paul Reiser. I also love how this movie just did its own thing instead of doing a watered-down retread of Alien. Very few franchises are as willing to radically mix it up from entry to entry as this one is, and it’s worth saluting when it happens.

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Correction, August 16, 2024, 11:35 a.m.: An earlier version of this article misstated the release date of the first season of Squid Game as September 17, 2001 rather than September 17, 2021. It’s slow, but not that slow. Also: the long gap in Mandalorian seasons was between the second and third, not first and second, seasons. Hence the reference to Book of Boba Fett being season 2.5.