The award-winning spy series returns with a new thriller and plenty of dark humor.

BarcelonaIt is one of the jewels of the Apple TV+ catalog and was recognized a week ago to the Emmys with an award for best direction. Thanks to word of mouth, Slow horses It has continued to grow in popularity and this Wednesday it premieres its fifth season with the sixth and seventh already in sight. Gary Oldman, who has received Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for this fiction, once again puts himself in the shoes of the unclassifiable Jackson Lamb, the head of a group of MI5 spies banished for uselessness in a seedy office. As expected, despite Lamb's efforts to work as little as possible, both he and his subordinates will end up involved in a new mission that, this time, will be linked to a shooting in central London.

While a lonely and with an incel gesture opens fire in the middle of London, in the office of the slow horses – from where Lamb and his subordinates work – spirits are low: River (Jack Lowden) feels like he's wasted, Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) is about to start a six-month leave, and Shirley (Aimeen-F-Fion) is from Marcus, his partner in crime. All this happens in the background when the spies discover that Ho, the office technology expert and candidate for the award for the most unpleasant person in the unit, has started dating a beautiful and glamorous girl, something that everyone finds surprising and makes them suspicious.

Sarcastic scripts

Gary Oldman, who admits that he "adores" the entire team of the series, believes that one of the reasons why Slow horses has become one of the most popular fictions on Apple TV+ are the characters, "people we can identify with." "We are so contaminated with the idea that the world of spies is being in casinos and driving an Aston Martin that I think the series connects with people because the characters that appear are normal people who do heroic things, without any artifacts," he argued in a conversation with Variety.

Lamb's foil is River Cartwright, who always wants to prove he's a better spy than people think. The character is played by Jack Lowden, who is in the midst of a professional and personal rise. Beyond the rumors that place him as one of the possible candidates for James Bond, the Scotsman will star in a new Apple TV+ series, Berlin noir, and will be Mr. Darcy in the adaptation ofPride and Prejudice from Netflix. He also just became a father with his partner, Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, with whom he has a production company that has already made a couple of films. The role of Cartwright came to him after participating in several period dramas, and the actor says he was immediately drawn to the project because of the tone of the scripts. "The reason was because the character, and in fact most of the characters in the series, is very sarcastic and cutting. The script was the reason I wanted to participate in the series," he explains in Hunter Magazine The actor, who has also received Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for his character.

Slow horses adapts a sprawling literary saga by Mick Herron, which includes nine titles, the latest published this August. The seventh season, announced this July by Apple TV+, will bring the British author's eighth book to the small screen. While waiting to find out whether the platform will greenlight a new installment, Apple TV+ has an adaptation of another of Herron's sagas in its pipeline, Down Cemetery Road, starring Emma Thompson.