Most critics like Slow Horses, and the praise lands in the same place almost every time: Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, the unwashed, wheezing head of Slough House. Several reviews single out Kristin Scott Thomas and Olivia Cooke alongside him, and the ensemble is generally credited with making a dingy office full of failed spies worth watching. Critics also warm to the approach: an old-fashioned surveillance thriller that builds its tension without gadgets, set in a London that looks properly grubby.
The reservations cluster around tone. The Telegraph finds the promised dark comedy thinner than advertised, Collider thinks the series cannot decide whether it is a drama or a comedy, and Variety finds the hostage plot more familiar than the jokes around it. The Guardian is the lone dissenter, finding the whole concept too familiar to grip. The spread is otherwise narrow: nearly everyone else lands somewhere between solid and impressive.