Apple TV+ just confirmed that "Slow Horses" is galloping back for a sixth season, which is genuinely wild when you consider most streaming shows get axed after one season and a vague tweet from a confused intern.
The Gary Oldman spy dramedy, based on Mick Herron's novels, has somehow become the little show that could while everyone was busy arguing about which dragon show disappointed them this quarter.
For the uninitiated, the premise is basically "what if MI5 had a detention hall for screwups and one of them was a farting, chain-smoking genius played by Gary Oldman." It's the anti-James Bond.
No tuxedos, no Aston Martins, just fluorescent lighting, bad coffee, and people who peaked in a filing cabinet.
Season 6 will reportedly adapt "Joe Country," the sixth book in Herron's Slough House series.
If you haven't read it, congratulations on having free time and a functioning sleep schedule.
The rest of us are out here mainlining spy fiction like it's a prescription.
Here's the thing about this show that makes it genuinely worth your attention: it refuses to be cool.
Every other spy property is desperate to convince you it's sexy and important. "Slow Horses" opens with Oldman's Jackson Lamb insulting everyone in a 50-foot radius and then going back to eating a sandwich that's probably been in his desk since the Cameron administration.
It's refreshing in a way that most prestige TV forgot how to be.
Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Jonathan Pryce—it's like a British acting convention where everyone agreed to wear their worst coats.
And the show keeps killing people off in ways that make you genuinely nervous, which is more than we can say for the Marvel multiverse where death is basically a seasonal flu at this point.
Ratings-wise, "Slow Horses" has been a critical darling since day one, but it's also the kind of show that people discover three years late and then lecture you about at a dinner party.
They also just got into "The Bear" and think they invented it.
What's interesting is that Apple keeps renewing it despite it not being a "Wednesday"-level cultural phenomenon.
Either Tim Cook genuinely likes it, or someone in the accounting department is a sleeper agent.
Either way, we're getting more episodes, so we should probably stop asking questions.
The real question is whether Season 6 can maintain the momentum.
Season 4 was arguably the strongest yet, and Season 5 is already in the can.
By the time Season 6 drops, we'll all be six years older and Gary Oldman will somehow still look exactly the same, because that man has been 55 for three decades and it's frankly suspicious.
If you're not watching this show yet, you're either too busy or too well-adjusted.
It's six episodes a season, it's on a streaming service you're already paying for, and it features the single best use of profanity in modern television.
Do the math. **Our take:** "Slow Horses" is the rare show that gets better as it goes, which is basically unheard of in an era where most series run out of ideas by season three and start doing time travel.
Final Thoughts
Watch it, or at least pretend you did so you can nod along at parties.