The show\u2019s creator has gone, it\u2019s been retooled as a conventional thriller and it feels like it\u2019s starting to run out of ideas \u2013 even if it\u2019s as slick and confident as ever<\/p>\n
This is a new Slow Horses: season six is the first not to be guided by its creator, Will Smith, a writer whose previous work on The Thick of It and Veep explained why this espionage saga had an unusually sharp comic tongue. The absence of Smith\u2019s drollery is discernible in a more straight-faced new story, but the bigger problem is one of a creative work naturally eroding over time. Slow Horses is now old.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s always been a difficult, delicate proposition. The staff of Slough House, a purgatorial spin-off of MI5 where misfits and screw-ups are given boring work when it would make more sense to just fire them, regularly outstrip supposedly elite spies despite being shambling losers. Leading the field agents is River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), who has the good looks of a spy hero and some of the skills, but is also a brittle, luckless and rather whiny wretch, who regularly has to be saved from ignominious death. The jokes have helped us suspend our disbelief that River and the rest haven\u2019t yet been riddled with bullets, and the relocation of traditional spy thrills to decaying urban settings is still a tonic, but enjoying this conjuring trick gets harder every year.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/6c1528213b15607a1129626cbfb5570dac8ac805\/688_0_6880_5504\/master\/6880.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=0664c1fc5d9bcc4413b641a6bf90ecaa\" "\\"Slow")
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