Down Cemetery Road: Emma Thompson dazzles in the new Slow Horses

“As one door is pushed shut by a grimy MI5 boss, another creaks open,” said Tim Glanfield in The Times. The fifth season of “Slow Horses” may be over “but that doesn’t mean it’s time to mothball your television” while you wait for your next Mick Herron instalment. Another of Herron’s books – this time, his debut novel – has been adapted for the small screen. And, if you’re a fan of the Slough House “outsiders” and their “battles against the system”, you’ll enjoy this new show.

The action kicks off in Oxford, where “bored art restorer” Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson) is hosting a dinner party with her financier husband for one of his “particularly important and irksome” clients. But the evening is “cut short” by a deadly gas explosion at a neighbouring house. When Sarah realises that an injured child has “mysteriously disappeared”, she turns “amateur sleuth” to “find the girl, and some answers”. She soon stumbles on the offices of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), and the pair discover they are “up against a lot more than they first thought”.

Thompson is “every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical“ and “unlikely” as Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb in “Slow Horses”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. And Wilson delivers a performance that is just as “mesmeric”. Both are “unforgettable” female characters.

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It’s “great stuff”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. “There is not a wasted moment, not a wasted word.” Stuffed with plot twists, it “smooths out the book’s few technical problems” while retaining all of the “dry humour and acuity” that “Slow Horses” fans “will surely have been hoping” for.

I found some of the episodes too “padded” and, in the first half, the “momentum meanders in frustrating ways”, said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. However, the flaws become “minor irritants and not deal breakers”, thanks to the “perfectly cast” Thompson and her “top-notch” supporting cast.

Yes, it is a bit “messy here and there”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent. But that didn’t stop me “bingeing the whole lot, in thrall to the cast chemistry”. “Down Cemetery Road” is not “Slow Horses” but this crime thriller is “its own beast: faster, funnier and unrelenting”.