Slow Horses breaks an Apple TV+ record with season 6 renewal

Slow and steady wins the race over at Apple TV+. Slow Horses, the spy thriller led by Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden, was just renewed for a sixth season (ahead of its season five premiere), officially making it the longest-running series—comedy or drama—anywhere on the streamer. This is somewhat surprising, and not because Slow Horses doesn’t deserve this type of longevity—it does. But other great shows do too, and getting more than two seasons on any streamer is unusual these days. Series used to do clip shows just to have more episodes!

But enough doom and gloom—congrats to everyone’s favorite dysfunctional intelligence agents! Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, Slow Horses follows a group of MI5 agents confined to paperwork hell who still continuously find themselves mixed up in schemes, plots, and ever-present danger. In a press release, Apple TV+ revealed 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.” 

Slow Horses‘ upcoming fifth season will be based on London Rules, the fifth book in Herron’s series. That book sees London face a series of terrorist attacks at the same time as Slow Horse Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) must save himself from a series of attempts on his own life. Season five will premiere sometime in 2025; season four just wrapped up this past Wednesday. 

“I’m very committed to the show. I consider it very much a highlight of my career,” Oldman shared with The A.V. Club in a recent interview. “The bonus, really—and the surprise of doing it—is this sort of company feel that we have,” he continued. “I’m very fond of [the cast]. They’re just an amazing, really lovely group of people who I think have inhabited these characters and just do a brilliant job. So in terms of just the sheer day-to-day working of it, it’s not a chore, not a hardship. I love being around them. I think it’s pedigree stuff.”

In addition to those already mentioned, Slow Horses also stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar, Samuel West, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Joanna Scanlan, and Jonathan Pryce.