Nina Metz: Spies like us — from the self-serious ‘Jack Ryan’ to the darkly funny ‘The Recruit’ streaming has embraced the espionage drama
A cluster of espionage dramas premiered over the last few weeks and it’s a genre that works best when the ratio of “piecing things together” to “there will be blood” is weighted toward the brainier side of things. I’m fine with a soupcon of action and violence, so long as the main attraction is the thinking and squinting and figuring out where allegiances lie.
And that’s what you get in “Slow Horses,” the Apple TV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s British spy novels. They have a distinctly wry John le Carre skepticism, reducing MI5 to little more than a bumbling viper’s nest, with a disheveled Gary Oldman as an aging, pit-stained spy whose instincts are still sharp as ever. There’s real humor to be found in
