We get it—there is simply too much. So, as in years past, we are giving our editors a last-minute opportunity to plug the books, movies, albums, shows, skits, or any piece of cultural ephemera that didn’t quite get the attention or acclaim it deserved. To entertain your holiday guests, we present all the things you really should know about—as well as more of our year-in-review coverage—here.
Such is the onslaught of streaming that it’s easy to run hot and cold on anything new. Example: I was extremely hot on the first season of Apple TV+’s British spy drama Slow Horses when it debuted in April of 2022. It was six episodes, expertly done, with a mix of mordant wit and cloak-and-dagger action, based on the first of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels (about a band of misfit intelligence operatives exiled to a cul-de-sac department of MI5, nicknamed Slough House). But then the second season came along perhaps too soon—within the year, last December—and I felt a slight dimming of my enthusiasm. There was the same appealing cast (Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jack Lowden among them) and the same source material (the episodes were based on Herron’s 2013 novel Dead Lions). But there was also something knotty in the storytelling, something here-we-go-again about the humor, and I found myself watching more out of obligation and loyalty than escapist joy.
Overabundance is the curse of TV right now, and what do you know: Another season of Slow Horses is upon us. But it so happens that this third installment is far and away the best of the series so far, one of those flywheel seasons of television in which zippy pacing and well-timed cliff-hangers make you want to hammer that Next Episode button as soon as you can. (The first two episodes debuted on November 29, with the rest following weekly; season three will conclude two days after Christmas.)
What Slow Horses gets right is one of TV’s oldest tricks: propulsion over plausibility, stakes without self-seriousness. I thought of 24 watching these episodes (all six, at breakneck speed, via critics screeners), reminded of when that Kiefer Sutherland–led Fox action drama first debuted more than two decades ago and we were all content to think of national security as a frictionless game of good guys somehow saving America with seconds to spare, every single time. Slow Horses isn’t retro (or retrograde, like the torture-happy 24 proved to be), but it’s reassuring in that old-fashioned way. We may be stuck in gloomy, grimy post-Brexit London, surrounded by corporatized institutions more dangerous than terrorist networks, but there are still MI5 joes to root for who get out of scrapes and gun battles and somehow save the day.
Which is to say that Slow Horses is escapism, pure and simple. This is also a show to watch with mom and dad over the holidays, or (teenage) daughter and son, and as great as Oldman is as the irascible spymaster Jackson Lamb, let me put in a word for Lowden as River Cartwright, the show’s closest thing to a Jason Bourne action hero, who manages to be handsome and hyper-capable and also plausibly hapless and accident-prone (hence his relegation to Slough House). Watching him infiltrate MI5 headquarters and tangle with his boss’s “dogs” (or tactical heavies) is a kinetic delight.
Start at the beginning if you’re a completist like me—but there is no reason not to start right here with Slow Horses’s best season, which is smart and highly untaxing. Season four, teased at the end, will be here before you know it.
