Slow Horses

Apple TV+'s Slow Horses launched in April 2022 and won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series in 2024. Adapted by Will Smith (the screenwriter, not the actor) from Mick Herron's continuing Slough House novel series, the show has run for four series at the time of writing, with a fifth ordered. Gary Oldman, in a stage-managed late-career return to British television, plays the central role of Jackson Lamb across all of them.

Slough House is the dumping-ground department where MI5 sends officers it cannot fire but does not want, the alcoholics, the disgraced, the bureaucratically inconvenient. Lamb (Oldman, flatulent, unwashed, ferociously intelligent) presides over the misfits, with Jack Lowden as the disgraced young agent River Cartwright at the centre, and Kristin Scott Thomas as the cold MI5 internal-politics monster Diana Taverner from the main building. Each series adapts one Herron novel; each is a tight conspiracy thriller in which the official intelligence community emerges as either incompetent or actively malign, and the rejects do the actual moral work.

Mick Jagger sings the theme song. Mick Herron has continued writing the books in parallel with the adaptations; the show's loyalty to his sour-funny prose is unusual among British television adaptations. Oldman has called Lamb the role of his career; the BAFTA jury seems to agree.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The best British spy series since the original Tinker Tailor, and the rare contemporary thriller that is also genuinely funny. Oldman gives a performance that is nominally a supporting one but defines the series.