Service: Apple TV+
Season Year: 2025
Watch: Apple TV+
I’m sorry, but this show is absolute nonsense. From minute one to minute 400. When I heard they’d renewed it for a second season, I almost did a spit take. Like a real one. It’s one of the most all-over-the-place series both narratively and tonally I’ve seen in quiet some time. It’s somehow both boring and bonkers. Both absurd and cringingly earnest. But its biggest issue is that the entire engine that drives the thing is flawed from jump. A character dies in an off-screen house explosion that we have never seen nor know anything about and another sad-sack woman who has absolutely no connection to said dead woman spends an agonizing eight episodes of British television trying to find justice for her. For absolutely no reason whatsoever. To be confused by your protagonist’s motivations based on a silly inciting event is not a good starting point. And it only gets more opaque and disjointed from there.
The aforementioned sad-sack, citizen vigilante is named Sarah Trafford. She’s played by a dough-faced, hangdog actress named Ruth Wilson. I feel like the show’s creators did her a little dirty, making her character a dowdy, skittish museum art conservator who could not look more sad and frumpy if she tried. She is the bedraggled half of what becomes the dynamic duo of the museum mouse and the private eye, Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson). Both of whom become entangled in the subsequent search for the blown-up woman’s daughter, who seemingly vanished from the scene of the house explosion. A daughter who, mind you, Sarah has never laid eyes on and also doesn’t know. Yet she abandons her job, her husband (who is a degenerate anyway) and decides to risk her life in and amongst a trio of soldiers-turned-assassins and a group of government baddies looking to cover up some military experimentation stuff. It’s all a giant idiotic cover-up that our sad-sack has stumbled into. With Zoë your prototypical crank, who is begrudgingly dragged into the mystery because her husband and fellow investigator is maybe murdered by this same group of shadowy assholes when he looks into a tip that Sarah gives him. It’s so convoluted and poorly constructed, I can’t even explain it in a couple simple sentences.
Needless to say, there are three killer dudes, all of whom happen to be black actors, but only two of whom are supposed to be brothers in the show, which almost seemed like an attempt to confuse the presumably 99% white viewing audience of this type of goofy Brit crime drama. Or maybe it’s just me. It’s probably just me. Anyway, one dude kills another one of the dudes and then the other dude ends up trying to kill the first dude the rest of the show. Because the second dude was his brother. Got it? Meanwhile, there’s this really tall actor named Darren Boyd (who they confusingly name ‘C’) who is some sort of minister or something who might as well twirl his mustache and kick babies the whole series. But he basically just hurls insults at his underling, Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), and commands him to “clean this fucking mess up” in every scene. Now, I’ve seen Akhtar in quite a few things at this point, but his character in this is one of the most confounding and irritating I’ve ever seen. He’s this sniveling toady whose job is completely unclear and his kind of jittery, stammering acting style makes his scenes pretty unwatchable. They’re weirdly written, strangely acted and unnecessarily confusing in a show that is already shaky plot-wise and uneven in an almost disturbing way. As if they assigned the script to different writers depending on the focus and then just kind of threw them in a notebook at the end of the day without tying any of it together.
There is some indication at points that this is meant to be a black comedy. But only when Emma Thompson is on screen. This is based on a Mick Herron novel, after all. The same dude whose novels are the basis of Slow Horses. Thompson plays the Gary Oldman role here. The off-putting jerk who is also always the smartest person in the room. And can, occasionally be bitingly funny. In this case, however, we have no River Cartwright to laugh at. I think perhaps Akhtar’s character is supposed to fill that role, but his presence is just annoying more than it is comical or amusing. So, outside of Zoë, this show is just straight up sad and dark. And after they fake kill Zoë for the third time, I was like… this feels manipulative and stupid. Because it is. You can try to “kill” Chewbacca once, but after that I’m just gonna call it lame and move on. Anyhow, the show is also unnecessarily graphically violent and the plot devolves into just one big chase, as the ladies and one of the assassins — who is somehow related to the missing girl — run from this other terminator assassin who was ostensibly put on their trail by C and Hamza because they have unraveled the secret experimental soldier stuff they were doing. Plus he’s trying to avenge his brother, who was that first assassin who got killed. But they’re also holding the girl for some reason, which seems odd considering they were willing to blow up her entire family and she only survived by sheer luck. Why not just like drown her in a bucket or something? Well, because the now “good” assassin toting Zöe and Sarah, Downey (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), thinks she may be his daughter and not the daughter of the dude who got blown up along with the woman in the apartment… And then you realize why all actors cast as soldiers are black — to create some ambiguity in the parentage of the bi-racial daughter? Though we never see the woman who died, so we have to assume she’s a white lady? I don’t know. These points are totally unimportant to the convoluted plot, but whatever, this is how much my mind wanders when I’m bored.
Ultimately, this just becomes another one of those shootouts on a hillside in an abandoned, crumbling old commercial complex in England or wherever. The terminator assassin, who is an indestructible killing machine taking out other professional killers with ease, being felled by some novice in a stupid way that only happens in television shows. There’s also some disturbingly bad CGI or AI or whatever it is in several scenes that make me worry for the future of TV. Honestly, though, I’ve seen a couple episodes of British sci-fi, and they don’t give two shits about how fake stuff looks. So hopefully it’s just that. I just can’t figure out why this thing is such a dull mess of a show. The unnecessarily complicated plot points that are both over and under explained, the underdeveloped characters and the uneven performances all lead me to wonder if perhaps they only green-lit a second season to maintain the Mick Herron IP for some future project after Slow Horses wraps. This just wasn’t a successful season of television in any shape or manner. Not even a usually charismatic Emma Thompson could save this rudderless car crash. To be honest, her haircut alone is a reason to not tune into season two. It’s an abomination. Her haircut. But also the show.
