Remember Apple TV+? It launched a few weeks ago and then immediately got left in the dust by Disney+. But the Apple streaming service is still kicking, and not ready to instantly throw in the towel. Instead, they’re looking for new material – and they’ve found it. Slow Horses will star Gary Oldman as a leader of a team of British spies, which sure sounds a lot like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That’s not a complaint.

Slow Horses “follows a team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5 – Slough House.” Gary Oldman leads the series as a character with the delightfully fake name “Jackson Lamb,” described as “the brilliant but irascible leader of the spies who end up in Slough House due to their career-ending mistakes.”

The show will be written by Will Smith (no, not the one you’re thinking of), with Graham Yost executive producing. While Apple’s original shows haven’t inspired much fanfare, I’m always up for some cold-blooded British spy stories. If this ends up being anything like the Oldman-starring Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, we might be in for a treat.

Slow Horses is adapted from Mick Herron’s CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage books. The first book’s synopsis has a bit more background on the story:

Slough House is Jackson Lamb’s kingdom; a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a service file on a train, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations – the slow horses – and bitterest among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations.

But when a young man is abducted, and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live on the internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. Is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers’ connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda …

And unless the slow horses can prove they’re not as useless as they’re thought to be, a young man’s death is going to echo around the world.

No word on when we might see this thing. Apple TV+ currently has only a handful of shows available, with a new one – the spooky horror series Servant – debuting later this month.

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