There is a joke buried in the fact that “Slow Horses” keeps winning Emmys, because the show is about a department of people who are not good at their jobs, filed away in a building British intelligence uses as somewhere to forget about them. At this year’s ceremony, Saul Metzstein won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for the episode “Scars,” which makes it three years running that the series has taken either the writing or the directing prize. The following day, Apple renewed it for an eighth season, which is the kind of vote of confidence most dramas never get once, let alone this early. Season six has not aired a single frame yet.
That season lands on Wednesday 16 September, six episodes running weekly through 21 October. It is adapted from “Joe Country” and “Slough House,” the sixth and seventh novels in Mick Herron’s CWA Gold Dagger-winning Slough House series. Apple’s own logline is characteristically dry about what that involves, promising only that season six “sees the Slow Horses on the run as Diana Taverner embroils them all in a fatally high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge.” Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the setup of “Slow Horses” season six, and for which of Mick Herron’s novels the next two seasons are drawing on.
The following day, Apple renewed it for an eighth season, which is the kind of vote of confidence most dramas never get once, let alone this early. Season six has not aired a single frame yet.”
The category Metzstein won is worth a look before anything else, because it says something about the room he was standing in. He beat Vince Gilligan for “Pluribus” and Noah Wyle for “The Pitt,” along with Salli Richardson-Whitfield for “The Gilded Age” and Hanelle M. Culpepper for “Paradise.” That is not a soft field, and Gilligan in particular arrived this year carrying the goodwill of two of the most admired dramas of the century, and the Academy still handed the directing prize to a British spy show about civil servants filling in forms.
What makes the renewal genuinely interesting, rather than just good news for people who enjoy Gary Oldman being rude, is what has been happening behind the camera while those awards piled up. Will Smith, the British screenwriter who adapted Herron’s books for television and ran the show from season one, left after season five. Gaby Chiappe adapted season six, the one arriving on Wednesday. Ben Vanstone, currently showrunner on “All Creatures Great and Small,” took season seven, which shot in October 2025 and is already finished. That is three different people steering a series across three consecutive seasons, and Apple has now ordered an eighth on top of it.
Shows do not usually survive that, or at least the conventional wisdom says they do not, and the conventional wisdom is not obviously wrong here. A showrunner is the person who holds the tone. “Slow Horses” lives almost entirely on tone, on the precise register where Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is a disgusting, cruel man and also the only person in the building who will go to the wall for his staff. Push that balance a few degrees in either direction and the whole thing curdles into a straight thriller, or into a sitcom about a bad boss. So the honest position on season six is that nobody outside Apple knows yet whether it holds. The first real evidence arrives on Wednesday.
One detail in the season six credits cuts against the worry, though, and it deserves to sit right next to the Emmy. Adam Randall directs season six. Randall is the man who won this same Outstanding Directing prize in 2025, for the episode “Hello Goodbye.” So while the writing has changed hands, the person shaping how the thing actually looks and moves is someone the Television Academy singled out a year ago. That is continuity of a kind, just not the kind a press release tends to lead with, and it might matter more than the credit order suggests.
The cast holds as well, which is the other thing steadying the ship. Oldman is back as Lamb, alongside Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) and Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves). Christopher Chung, Rosalind Eleazar, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Jonathan Pryce and Hugo Weaving are all on Apple’s announced list. BAFTA winner Lenny Rush joins this season, and Apple has not said who he is playing. Sidonie Baker (Olivia Cooke) was confirmed as returning when the season six trailer arrived in August, which is its own small piece of information about where this run is going.
It is worth noticing that Apple is still releasing this weekly, six Wednesdays in a row, rather than dropping the set and letting people inhale it in an evening. For a spy show built on slow accumulation, on a joke in episode two paying off in episode five, that is probably the right call. It is certainly the call that keeps the series in the conversation for six weeks instead of one. See-Saw Films produces, and Oldman himself is among the executive producers, which is not nothing when you are working out why a cast this expensive keeps coming back to a damp office set.
Season seven already has its story, and it is the one Herron readers have been waiting to see filmed. It adapts “Bad Actors,” the eighth novel, and the official logline has Lamb and his Slow Horses hunting a mole at the heart of the British Government before that mole can bring down the state. Season eight then takes “Clown Town,” the ninth, and its logline promises that Lamb and Taverner will have their “most explosive confrontation yet.” Those two have circled each other since the first season, so if the show is finally cashing that in, season eight is where the whole thing is pointed.
Read the renewal next to the Emmy record and a slightly strange pattern turns up for a show of this profile. The Television Academy lists 23 nominations and three wins for the series. All three of those wins are behind the camera: Will Smith for writing in 2024, Adam Randall for directing in 2025, Saul Metzstein for directing in 2026. Gary Oldman has been nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor three years running and has not won once. Jack Lowden picked up a supporting nomination in 2024 and went home empty-handed too. For a series whose entire public image is a photograph of Oldman looking like he slept in a skip, the trophies have gone almost entirely to the people who built the room around him.
None of which tells us whether season six is any good, and that is the part worth being straight about. Apple ordering an eighth season the day before the sixth premieres is a scheduling decision and a signal to talent, not a review. Plenty of shows have been renewed and then wobbled badly. What it does tell us is that Apple has seen seasons six and seven, both of which are finished, and decided it wants more of whatever is in them. That is not proof of anything, but it is the closest thing to an informed opinion currently available, because almost nobody outside the production has watched either one. Line the three dates up, too, and the week looks engineered: the Emmy on 14 September, the season eight order on 15 September, the premiere on 16 September. Three consecutive days, which is a run of publicity most shows would trade a writer for.
What Do You Think? Does a show that runs this much on tone survive losing the writer who set that tone, or is season six the moment “Slow Horses” starts drifting? Why do you think the Television Academy keeps rewarding this series for writing and directing while Gary Oldman goes home empty-handed three years in a row? And is Apple ordering season eight before season six airs a sign of genuine confidence, or a studio locking down a cast it is worried about losing?
See you on the next binge!
