Slow Horses recap: Season 5, episode 1, 'Bad Dates'

Slow Horses is back for another year of bumbling, farting, and other disreputability. My review of the fifth season premiere, "Bad Dates" — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I arm my staff, just because they're bored... 

Slow Horses is one of the best recent examples of a series that gets to have things both ways, tonally. It's not exactly a parody of spy stories, but the team from Slough House is so inept and/or weird in so many ways that it often plays like one. It shows you what traditional, cool spies look like, then turns the focus onto the Slow Horses, who are anything but. Over at the Park, Emma Flyte wears nice suits and carries herself with an air of quiet confidence; Shirley Dander wears a jacket that looks like it should have been thrown out 30 years ago, and she does ridiculous things like leaping from a nightclub balcony onto a server she mistakes for an assassin. They are the worst possible people to try to solve these problems, even if they so often manage to do that.