Slow Horses Trailer: An Espionage Thriller Starring Gary Oldman And 'A Bunch Of Absolute Losers'

Gary Oldman is getting back in the spy game as a cranky MI5 agent who's been saddled with a rag-tag group of young spies. The latest series from Apple TV+ stars Oldman as Jackson Lamb, a brilliant but bitter veteran spy who heads up the Slough House, an MI5 department where careers go to die. It's the bottom of the barrel for agents, filled out entirely by those who have made career-ending mistakes and are thus forced to endure some hilarious verbal battering at the hands of Jackson, who obviously doesn't know his way around a pep talk. All the while, the newly-exiled agents are shut out of any interesting or important developments across the agency, tasked with mind-numbingly boring pencil-pushing assignments that keep them out of the field. A thrilling concept for a series, right?

Worry not — if fiction has taught us anything, it's that agents exiled from field work (much like movie and TV cops who gets their gun and badge confiscated) can't help but stick their nose where it doesn't belong. Determined to restart their careers, the unlikely team ends up in the middle of a top-secret dangerous mission. And if the oncoming action isn't enough to get you amped, "Slow Horses" dips into dark comedy rather than taking the cut and dry thriller approach. See for yourself, in the first trailer for the series below.

"Slow Horses" takes its story from the Mick Herron novel of the same name, the first in a series dubbed "Slough House." As the first novel's synopsis sums up, the so-called 'slow horses' have all "disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated here. Maybe they messed up an op badly and can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle—not unusual in this line of work. One thing they all have in common, though, is they all want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there ─ even if it means having to collaborate with one another."

The first season will adapt the first book of Herron's espionage thrillers, with the overall novel series spanning eight volumes and two novellas. So if all goes well and "Slow Horses" arrives to a warm reception, we may just see more of these washed-up agents in action. The ensemble cast includes Olivia Cooke, Saskia Reeves, Dustin Demri-Burns, Rosalind Eleazar, Christopher Chung, Paul Higgins, Freddie Fox, Chris Reilly, Steve Waddington, Paul Hilton, Antonio Aakeel, and Peter Judd, with a special guest appearance by Jonathan Pryce. Fingers crossed that "Slow Horses" turns into the success story it looks like on the surface — and with Academy Award winner Gary Oldman at the helm, praise feels inevitable. Per Apple TV+, here's the show's official synopsis:

Slow Horses is a darkly humorous espionage drama that follows a dysfunctional team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5 known un-affectionately as Slough House. Oldman stars as Jackson Lamb, the brilliant but irascible leader of the spies, who end up in Slough House due to their career-ending mistakes as they frequently find themselves blundering around the smoke and mirrors of the espionage world.

The series is produced for Apple TV+ by See-Saw Films and adapted for television by "Veep" and "Paddington 2" writer Will Smith, who executive produces alongside Graham Yost. James Hawes, known for episodes of "Black Mirror," "Snowpiercer," and "Penny Dreadful," directs all six episodes and executive produces. "Slow Horses" premieres globally with the first two episodes on April 1, 2022, followed by one episode weekly every Friday.