Slow Horses lost its showrunner after five seasons. Season 6 opened at 100% — and his replacement says she didn't take his job
The sixth season of Slow Horses arrived on Wednesday without the man who built the show, and the scoreboard did not flinch: 100% on twenty reviews. The woman who took the job says she never stepped into his shoes, and after five seasons she may be right about why that worked.
The sixth season of Slow Horses went up on Apple TV on Wednesday, six episodes running weekly to 21 October, and it is the first one made without the man who turned Mick Herron's novels into a television show. Will Smith, who ran the writers' room for five seasons, left over scheduling conflicts. You would not know it from the reviews.
The Tomatometer sat at 100% on 20 reviews on premiere night. That is not a small-sample fluke — it is the third season out of six to land on a clean hundred, after seasons two and four. The other three scored 95, 98 and 96.
Viewers are fractionally less unanimous: across six seasons the show averages 98% from critics and 88% from the audience. The season 6 audience score does not exist yet — fewer than 50 ratings on premiere night, because people were still watching.
The handover nobody is supposed to notice
Gaby Chiappe took the job. She created The Beast Must Die, and she is careful about what she inherited — by her account, considerably less than the whole thing.
"I don't feel like I stepped into Will's shoes," Chiappe told TheWrap. "I took over one aspect of the many things Will was doing."
Gary Oldman, who has played Jackson Lamb for four and a half years, called the change "pretty seamless" and pointed at the reason: "After five seasons [and] how many books that Mick has written, we've got a really solid template." That is the quiet advantage of adapting a finished novel every year. The scripts have a spine before anyone sits down to write them.
The cast did not move either. Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana Taverner, Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar and Christopher Chung have all been in these parts since 2022. A new showrunner walking into a room where nobody needs introducing is a different job from starting a show.
The premiere does not ease anyone in
Episode one opens with assassins going after a former Slough House agent, and it does not cut away. River Cartwright spends it grieving his grandfather, and Chiappe puts him at the lowest point the character has been written to: "River is at a really, really low ebb. He's unanchored. He's lost everything." His estranged father then walks back into the story. The rest arrives one Wednesday at a time:
- 16 September — episode 1, out now.
- 23 and 30 September — episodes 2 and 3.
- 7 and 14 October — episodes 4 and 5.
- 21 October — the finale.
Six seasons, six novels, one cast that has not been recast once, and an average of 98% across the run. British television does not usually get to keep a thing this long without breaking it.
One more number for the same night. Neagley, Prime Video's spinoff, dropped all eight of its episodes on Wednesday too and opened at 89% — the lowest anything in the Reacher universe has scored. Two shows about damaged people who used to work for the state, eleven points apart, on the same evening.
Previously we wrote: SNL closed its season 52 cast ten days before the premiere — and one of the two new hires had already tried out in an earlier year
