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Shows Like Slow Horses
Like so many of Apple TV+'s excellent series, it took a while for Slow Horses to catch on even though it's been outstanding from the very start. These days, though, the Gary Oldman spy thriller series, about a group of MI5 agents who've been banished to small, boring outpost after making alleged career-ending mistakes, is a critics' favorite, and it just wrapped up its fourth season. So, uh, now what? You've caught all the way up on this show, and now you've got a year to wait for Season 5.
Fortunately for you and everyone else, Slow Horses is part of a proud tradition of spy and thriller TV shows — a few of our favorite series of all time fall under that umbrella. Below you'll find some of our recommendations for spy and thriller shows to watch now that you're trapped in a world without any new episodes of Slow Horses to watch.
Burn Notice
In Burn Notice, Jeffrey Donovan plays spy Michael Westen, who starts off the series by getting burned during an operation in Nigeria by a mystery person within the organization that he's worked for, which then leads to his capture and eventual exile in Miami. Despite having no identity, Westen has to carve out a life as a private investigator, with the help of his Irish Republican Army girlfriend (Gabrielle Anwar) and his former SEAL friend (Bruce Campbell), while trying to figure out what happened that led to his exile. There are some rather stark parallels with Slow Horses here, at least in their premises — but these two series go to some very different places, don't worry.
The Americans
Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell star in FX's The Americans as a suburban husband and wife named Philip and Elizabeth Jennings who run a travel agency in the 1980s in Virginia... and who also happen to be deep cover Russian spies who have been living this very stressful lie for decades while raising a son and daughter who don't have a clue. The Americans is a large-scope spy epic that spans the entire 1980s, but its true power is in its painstaking empathy for every single major character — there are no true antagonists here. Despite running for six whole seasons, The Americans never spins its wheels, and it wrapped up with one of the greatest series finale episodes in TV history.
Line of Duty
This British drama is a spy series in the guise of a cop show, as it focuses on a fictional internal affairs unit that goes up against a clandestine criminal organization that's infiltrated the police. All six seasons of Line of Duty tell a seemingly standalone story that ends up involving that organization and its legion of dirty cops in some way, and while it's extremely unlikely that creator Jed Mercurio and his writing team planned the show's six-season arc in advance, they took great care to not pull plot twists out of thin air — every secret baddie on this series is a character who was around during Season 1. Line of Duty is a show that rewards you handsomely for being able to keep track of all its details.
Homeland
Brilliant bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and her mentor (Mandy Patinkin) had some awkward beginnings rooted in the United State's real world War on Terror, and it had a few major storytelling goofs over the years. But Homeland's secret weapon is its characters, and Carrie Mathison in particular — it's rare to see any sort of depiction of people with bipolar disorder, much less the main protagonist of a long-running TV show. But while Homeland isn't really as high-brow as it often tries to pretend it is, it remains an engrossing thriller through every silly twist because of how grounded its characters become as the series progresses. Alongside Danes and Patinkin, Homeland featured an incredible supporting cast with folks like F. Murray Abraham, Damian Lewis, Morena Baccarin, Rupert Friend, and Sarita Choudhury.
Killing Eve
The BBC series Killing Eve, based on the series of novels by Luke Jennings, had a very simple and very effective premise: An MI6 agent named Eve (Sandra Oh) becomes obsessed with finding a mysterious assassin known as Villanelle (Jodie Comer). And it doesn't take long before the obsession becomes mutual, kicking off a four-season game of cat and mouse, even while the two are busy with real missions that have nothing to do with this little feud. And with folks like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell serving as head writer on Seasons 1 and 2, respectively, this is a series that has some legit cred.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
This TV re-imagining of the 2005 movie of the same name swaps Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for Maya Erskine and Donald Glover, and reins in the premise a little bit in the process — in the film, the married couple worked for competing organizations, but here they're a fake-married spy duo, like on The Americans. Through the first season we follow this couple through eight missions as they get to know each other on the job, and the series' dryly funny tone serves it very well. Don't worry about the chemistry; Erskine and Glover are an outstanding pair to watch. And with a supporting guest cast that includes names like John Turturro, Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Sarah Paulson, and Ron Perlman, every episode is a surprise.
The Night Manager
This adaptation of the John le Carre novel of the same name involves a former British soldier called Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) serving as the night manager of a hotel in Cairo, as he unwittingly gets caught up in a plot against a major arms dealer (Hugh Laurie) and accidentally gets the lady he likes (who happens to also be the one who pulled him into all this) killed in the process. In turn, an MI6 agent (Olivia Colman) uses that incident to pull Pine further into this whole plot. Hiddleston and Laurie are outstanding and impossible to look away from, and Colman is as delightful as always. But this is not a series that coasts on vibes — it's a smartly told story that does justice to the excellent source material.
Counterpart
In Counterpart, a boring older man named Howard Silk (J.K. Simmons) discovers that the office he works for manages a passage between the Earth he knows and an Earth in a similar, parallel universe. Crazy! What's crazier is that the two worlds are in a sort of cold war, and the alternate version of Howard from that universe is a hardened spy. This excellent little Starz series was canceled before its time after just two seasons, but it's too interesting and unique for us to forget, particularly as we sit in the shadow of Marvel's goofy attempts at multiverse storytelling. As a bonus, Counterpart's creator Justin Marks would go on to co-create this year's outstanding Shogun series for FX, so if you enjoyed that historical epic then you may want to check out this stellar example of Marks' past work. Sadly, this series has no streaming subscription home, and so you'll have to buy it if you want to watch, but it's worth it.