Slow Horses: Slow-Burn Rebuttal

★★★★☆

[See-Saw Films Apple TV+]

Slow Horses arrives like a corrective: a spy drama that chooses craft, patience, and moral seriousness over the usual streaming pyrotechnics. It refuses to be loud for loudness’s sake. The scripts, performances, opening graphics, soundtrack, and a bespoke theme song all work together to set a tone that is confident, wry, and humane. For anyone tired of spectacle-as-substitute, this series is a small, decisive triumph.

Mick Herron’s acid intelligence translates beautifully to screen: dialogue that snaps, plotting that privileges consequence, and a willingness to linger on the small, revealing moments that tell you everything you need to know about a character. The show prizes texture over spectacle; that patience is its greatest quality win. Slow Horses trusts viewers to hold contradictions and ambiguity, and it rewards that trust with storytelling that deepens the more you pay attention.

Mick Herron – “Those who write the rules rarely suffer their weight.”

At the heart of the series is Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb; filthy, tender, brutal, and utterly alive. Oldman re-centres the show, turning what could have been a caricature into a study of damaged professionalism and bittersweet humanity. The Slough House ensemble complement him perfectly, each actor revealing different kinds of institutional scarring. Together they prove that finely tuned performance and ensemble chemistry beat headline casting when the script gives actors real moral and emotional weight. 

From the opening graphics to Daniel Pemberton’s incidental score, Slow Horses signals its ambitions immediately. The theme song, “Strange Game,” was written specifically for the series, with Mick Jagger supplying lyrics and Daniel Pemberton composing the music, a pairing that sets the tone from the first beat and aligns perfectly with the show’s mixture of swagger and unease. Director James Hawes’s visual direction, uses the opening sequence like a thesis statement: in thirty seconds it tells you what kind of show you’re watching.

This series refuses to sentimentalize violence. It interrogates the psychological cost of taking lives and the slow erosion that comes from working inside systems that both demand and deny accountability. Dementia is treated not as shorthand but as an ethical and emotional rupture that reshapes loyalties and identity. Those thematic choices give Slow Horses its moral gravity: the show treats trauma and memory as continuing wounds rather than disposable plot devices.

One of Slow Horses’s clearest insights is how managerial rationalities, metrics, branding, box-ticking can destroy craft and judgement when applied to work that requires discretion and ‘institutional’ memory. The spy world here wears corporate forms and suffers corporate consequences: PR instincts, performance reviews, and optics repeatedly trump nuance and responsibility, often with catastrophic human cost. The series reads as a sustained critique of what happens when secret-service work is run like a business unit.

Quality in Slow Horses isn’t only visible in script and staging; it has bled into culture in small, telling ways. An admirer of the show has even named a racing horse Jackson Lamb, a playful, fitting tribute to a character who is as much mythos as man. That anecdote is more than fan-service: it’s proof that a show built on craft rather than hype can lodge itself in people’s imaginations.

While Apple keeps exact global viewer totals private, platform charts and independent trackers placed Slow Horses among the most engaged streaming shows during its latest season launch. On release windows the series surged to the top of Apple TV+ charts in multiple territories, underlining that a craft-first approach can translate into mainstream reach.

Slow Horses is an insistently slow burning triumph: a show that proves quality still matters. If you care about writing that respects consequence, performances that reveal messy humanity, and production choices from the opening graphics to a bespoke Mick Jagger theme and Daniel Pemberton’s score that shape a show’s identity, this series is essential viewing. It’s not noise disguised as drama, it’s moral seriousness wrapped in dark humour, and it lingers long after the credits roll.

Make space for Slow Horses: it’s entertaining, ethically engaged, and a vivid reminder that craft outlasts hype.