Down Cemetery Road: Season 1

When you think about just how consistently good Slow Horses has been on Apple TV, it's hard not to get too excited about a new project from the creative team behind that spy thriller series. It's based on a novel by Mick Herron, the same author behind Slow Horses, using a screenplay written by Morwenna Banks, the same person who turned Slow Horses into a screenplay, and it shares many of the same producers and behind-the-scenes talent too. Essentially, Down Cemetery Road is a pseudo Slow Horses spinoff, with an emphasis on being a British crime thriller show.

Again, all of these things considered, you would hope that Down Cemetery Road could reach the same heights as Slow Horses but that's a mighty high bar to reach. It has talent, it has a skilled creative team, and it has a skilled production giant behind it, but does it succeed?

Objectively speaking, yes. Down Cemetery Road is a fine television show that has more going for it than against it. The plot constantly surprises with new reveals and developments, the cast deliver mostly strong performances, and there's an edge and level of thrill to each episode to match the genre it slots into. Yet, as excellent as Emma Thompson is in this show and always has been, she doesn't quite deliver to the same exceptional standards as Gary Oldman has in perhaps his greatest role in recent memory as Jackson Lamb. And similarly, the razor sharp edge and refined manner that makes a season of Slow Horses feel like it never once wastes a second of your time isn't quite present, perhaps because Down Cemetery Road spans eight episodes compared to Slow Horses' six.

The point I'm trying to make with precisely these two criticisms is that Down Cemetery Road is a good and recommendable television show but it doesn't reach Slow Horses' standards. Again, I feel as though this show is an episode or two too long and there's a distinct lack of a compelling antagonist as well, since the core villains are either shady government employees that barely interact with the main cast or apathetic killers with unmeaningful motivation. The strength of Down Cemetery Road is the conspiracy at its core, it's the unravelling of the twisted government plot and how it connects the various characters together. That's something Slow Horses has as well, but it also presents villains with a motivation you can understand or that you appreciate as antagonists. This show doesn't feature that to the same degree, as Adeel Akhtar's Hamza is mostly a bumbling coward, Fehiniti Balogun's Amos struggles to display any emotion, and Darren Boyd's C never comes face-to-face with the main duo of Thompson's Zoe and Ruth Wilson's Sarah. There's a lot of tugging between the various characters and it creates a bit of imbalance in the wider show.

Still, we're talking about a fine drama here. It's well-written and as mentioned earlier it has mostly strong performances. You'll become attached to the leading ladies and become somewhat obsessed with figuring out how all the pieces fall into place. But you might also wish it moved at a slightly faster pace by the time you reach episode five, and that some of the less vital moments and narrative threads were removed altogether. There's even entire threads that never get a proper conclusion in this season, ultimately delivering a end-product that doesn't have the same therapeutic conclusion as Slow Horses, as a comparison point once again.

So if you, like me, love Slow Horses and the team behind it, then you should watch Down Cemetery Road as there's enough to appreciate to make seeing the credits of episode eight feel rewarding. Just understand at the same time that it isn't Slow Horses and doesn't have the same precision, attention to detail, or remarkable level of refinement to it.