#Overplay the scene full
#Overplay the scene series

#Overplay the scene full

The show begins with a breathless action sequence now set at London’s Stansted Airport - a nine-minute scene full of earbud commands, sprinting, yelling, tackling and escalator misbehavior.

The show is more faithful to Herron’s novel than you might expect, with the result that the turns in the story can seem arbitrary and be hard to follow. “Slow Horses” demonstrates that six episodes - a standard length for British crime dramas - isn’t necessarily enough time to adapt a complexly plotted, fully characterized book. If there’s a problem with the show, it’s the inverse of what’s sometimes referred to as Netflix bloat. It also showcases a great cast - Oldman is joined by, among others, Kristin Scott Thomas as MI5’s steely head of operations, Jonathan Pryce as a retired spymaster and Jack Lowden as a young agent recently arrived at Slough House, and they’re all fantastic. It’s a complicated conspiracy thriller crossed with an office comedy, and it lightly dusts grungy realism with off-kilter, absurdist touches that only occasionally misfire. The show around Oldman is not entirely up to the standards set by his performance, but it’s not too far off - “Slow Horses” is a highly satisfying celebration and sendup of the John le Carré novels that clearly inspired it. Working with you has been the lowest point in a disappointing career.” There they carry out pointless grunt work while enduring Lamb’s constant, finely wrought insults. Sporting an unruly sweep of graying hair and shapeless suits that look like they were bought at the height of the Cold War, Oldman is the backbone of “Slow Horses.” Lamb is the boss of the fictional Slough House, a shabby warren of offices where agents of the British intelligence agency MI5 are sent if they make a sufficiently embarrassing or costly mistake. But with all due respect to Spall, it’s hard to imagine anyone better as the ill-tempered, acid-tongued Lamb than the man who got the part, Gary Oldman.

Twelve years later, “Slow Horses” has made it to the screen (premiering Friday on Apple TV+) and Herron’s advice has been ignored. He described his most vivid character, Jackson Lamb, perhaps a bit redundantly, as “ Timothy Spall gone to seed.”

#Overplay the scene series

When he wrote “Slow Horses,” the first of his Slough House series of alt-spy thrillers, the British novelist Mick Herron helpfully included some casting advice.