Hacker Cinema
Slow Horses
2022 · TV series · 6 seasons
Follow a dysfunctional team of MI5 agents—and their obnoxious boss, the notorious Jackson Lamb—as they navigate the espionage world's smoke and mirrors to defend England from sinister forces.
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22 comments on Hacker News
I’ve seen most of those. Slow horses is phenomenal no notes. for all mankind would be as well if not for the low grade melodrama of the middle seasons, but all the space stuff is amazing. silo is good fun but like severance we’ve gotten two short seasons in how many years? shrinking started out great but did a speedrun in one season of what normally takes jenji kohan three. Foundation has decent highs especially with the dynasty and invictus in season two, but the lows are loooww. And of course severance might even be a masterpiece.
But my point wasn’t that they don’t make good television because they do, it’s that their shows aren’t talked about nearly as much in the mainstream because people don’t have Apple tv. I think Ted lasso and to a lesser degree severance are really their only major popular hits. Most people I talk to haven’t seen slow horses. If it were on Netflix it would be the opposite.
Other way round, IMO of course …
For me the books have depth that the TV series doesn't – and can't – have: some of the plots are dumbed down a bit to give more visual impact, and of course you don't get the same depth of characterisation, or the insights into Lamb's and the others' pasts because much of it comes out in interior monologue, and it's much harder for the shows to, erm, show.
And you miss one of the glories of Herron's writing: as a stylist is on a par with Terry Prachett for cramming wisdom into short witty phrases. He is very good at memorable phrases skewering contemporary life, and particularly politicians. The shows bring some of this out, but there's only so much that you can do in dialogue.
Take this passage from the first book:
> Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.
Herron, Mick. Slow Horses: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 1) (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition.
That is a brilliant piece of characterisation, and if you know anything about British politics, you know exactly who he's describing, and how accurate a character assassination this is. The TV show's Peter Judd goes out of its way to make the character a lot more generic – their Judd is merely 'typical cynical nasty venal politician' and it loses a bit of force accordingly.
Or take the set piece descriptions which start every book: they recreate the seedy world of Slough House in a way that the shows can only hint at.
Not to say the shows aren't very good – they are one of the best things on TV – but the books are even better.
IMO, of course…
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
They didn’t postpone season five of Slow Horses despite being exactly the same content
You don't cancel them when there isn't any show on that you're watching, and then resubscribe?
Like I feel like it's pretty common to be either a Netflix or Disney/Hulu household all the time, and then just subscribe to one other in any given month depending on what show you're mainly watching.
Like now that Slow Horses is back, it's time to wait a couple weeks and then switch to Apple TV for a month to catch the 6 episodes.
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
The concert hall and theater is indeed the main reason most people who aren’t residents end up in the Barbican. When I lived in London it was almost a classical music rite of passage to get completely lost on the wrong concrete overhead walkway while rushing to get to an LSO concert there.
Unrelated, but recently the complex has been appearing in the general consciousness again as the excellent Apple TV series/spy novels Slow Horses (about a bunch of outcast MI5 agents) is set near there.
I've been watching a British spy show called Slow Horses. So far a huge chunk of season 2 is spies looking at camera surveillance footage. It sounds like it's really that bad.
As it's only a weekend and at best you could maybe binge Slow Horses I would recomend the standalone episodes of Mythic Quest.
Season 1 has "A Dark Quiet Death" Season 2 has "Backstory"
My completely unscientific impression is that other services are making the effort to produce high-quality films and series, including Apple TV+ (Slow Horses, Silo, For All Mankind, Foundation, etc.), Max/HBO (Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, GoT, The Last of Us, etc.), FX (Shogun, The Bear, The Old Man, Fargo, etc.), and AMC (Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Night Manager, etc.). Whatever you think of the quality of shows in those services, they at least show genuine effort to make things that don't suck.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses Lessons in Chemistry Severance Ted Lasso Shrinking Mythic Quest Roar CODA The Problem with John Stewart And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale For All Mankind Criminal Record Killers of the Flower Moon Foundation Strange Planet The Morning Show Greyhound They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
Pesonally, I prefer quality over quantity.
> Slow Horses has been almost impossibly well-received by critics and audiences. Now in season 4, I think this may actually be one of the overall-highest scored TV shows ever in terms of ones that have run this many seasons.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/06/i-am-begging-you-to-watch-slow-horses-apple-tvs-best-100-rated-show/
I believe it has been renewed for season 6.
I believe Apple has some fantastic shows. Severance, Tehran, Silo, Slow Horses, Liason, Physical, For All Mankind (season 1).
> I do love more liberty with reality when it comes to [fantasy] movies
I have the same - probably because you know from experience that, e.g., someone taking the punishment that John Wick or Bourne does wouldn't be running around two minutes later but you have no frame of reference for, say, an 8ft goblin doing the same.
(Like the first episode of Slow Horses: there is no way a huge anti-terrorism training exercise across London stations wouldn't have every second of communications recorded for later examination and it made the whole premise of the show - that the fella is exiled because someone lied about what they said to him over those comms - nonsense to me.)
I've read the first 2 Slow Horses books. A wonderful antidote to the hyper efficient slick characters featured in e.g. Bond films. Even screw-up spies have their moments.
Perhaps too British to appeal to non-Brits.
> (The first book was made into a TV series on Apple TV).
There have now been 2 seasons of Slow Horses (apple TV series) and more are planned.
I haven't read the books, but this is a good series.
Graham Greene's The Quiet American has a similar feel. About an American spy in Vietnam.
Edit: Also, Mick Heron's Slow Horses series, based on a group of outcaste MI5 spies in London. (The first book was made into a TV series on Apple TV).
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
Farty Slow Horses Oldman could have pulled off a good Smiley, too. But 2011 Oldman? The same year he did Deathly Hallows? Not a chance. Smiley not being like 2011-era Gary Oldman is one of his most important character traits. Also: Toby Jones is fantastic and it would have been great to see more of him.
It was a good movie and true in all other respects to the book.
Wasn't Campion's Power of the Dog an Oscar-rated Netflix film? I agree overall however, Apple is competing with the legacy content monsters the right way. Severance was great art, Slow Horses is compelling, Foundation had its issues but also better moments than any Netflix Sci-Fi show I've seen the past few years (Nightflyers, Another Life, etc don't even come close), and For All Mankind is well-written.
Netflix is screwed.
It used to be that if you wanted to watch a movie, you could find it on Netflix, put it in your DVD queue and in a few days receive the DVD in the mail. Their inventory was really good, (with some exceptions) and the service had pretty fast turnaround. Phase 1.
Then broadband started becoming more available, so streaming became a natural extension. Here's where Netflix faced bigger challenges. Initially, IP owners were happy to sell streaming rights for pennies since they didn't have any idea of the real value. Netflix leveraged this to build up an even bigger catalog that wasn't constrained by the number of DVDs in their inventory.
Netflix started to dabble in producing (and buying) content for their streaming. Good stuff like Stranger Things. The Crown. Dark. Babylon Berlin. And IP owners started raising the prices for renewals for movies and series in their catalogs. Netflix decided to cheap out on the quality of their shows. And they started to cut down on their DVD catalog as well.
Now you have all of the IP owners with their own streaming services, so Netflix will find it really hard to stream anything but the crappiest stuff. And they've shown little ability to consistently produce quality series or movies.
Contrast this with ATV+. Apple knew that it had a huge potential customer base, but that licensing IP wasn't going to be sustainable; whatever they streamed had to be exclusive. So they started slow, trying to replace HBO for high quality content. And they had some meh shows like "See." Not bad, but not HBO. Then "The Morning Show," followed by "Ted Lasso." Now they're starting to get some traction. Having an infinite amount of money always helps, but they became pretty good at saying no. "For All Mankind" grabbed a chunk of sci-fi viewers. Greyhound captured the war nerds. Slowly, carefully, they've been building up a pretty solid catalog. Now you have shows like "Servant," "Slow Horses," "The Mosquito Coast," "Foundation."
Cap it off with a series and a movie that have set ATV+ on par with any streaming service: Severance and Coda.
Now ATV+ will never have the catalog that Disney+ has. They might be fine with that. But where does this leave Netflix? Netflix has no serious movies that could compete for an Oscar. They don't seem to have the ability to create must see TV anymore. Perhaps they're too driven by algorithms to give the viewer what Netflix "thinks" they want? I just can't see a path forward for Netflix as other than crappy shows. Even with their foreign content, they face increased price pressure and competition from the other SVODs.