Slow Horses, series six: Gary Oldman’s spy thriller is ‘as brilliant as ever’

Apple TV’s “critically lauded” series of adaptations of Mick Herron’s books has returned for a sixth season, said Ed Power in The Telegraph, and has once again pulled “off the perfect balancing act between dark humour and misanthropic spycraft”.

As before, the disillusioned MI5 agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) is stuck with the grumpy and flatulent “mastermind” Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) at Slough House – “a banishment room” in London for underperforming spies. Here, Cartwright and his colleagues do not live the lives of international mystery they once aspired to but are instead “condemned to a bureaucratic purgatory straight out of Samuel Beckett”.

The mood among the horses is, as ever, “decidedly gloomy”, said Ben Dowell in The Times. The rain beats down incessantly, Lamb’s personal habits have not improved, and poor Cartwright is grieving someone close to him. “Oh, and they keep getting bumped off.” A shadowy pair is hunting down individuals with links to Slough House and dispatching them with “deadly precision”. “It’s as brilliant as ever”, with “thrilling storytelling and some deftly applied comedy”. As always, everything is lifted whenever Oldman is on screen, “chomping crisps next to a dead body”.

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It’s a very good batch of episodes, said Rebecca Cook in Metro, but it doesn’t “quite click”. The one-liners and “Lamb-isms” aren’t up to scratch and the best gags are all in the trailer. “Slow Horses” has “set itself an impeccable standard” – one that this series does not quite meet.