Slow Horses Season 5 Reels From a Major Exit as Gary Oldman Adjusts to the Weakest Season Yet
Gary Oldman says Slow Horses is feeling the shake-up as creator-showrunner William James Smith exits after five seasons, admitting the transition took some getting used to.
Slow Horses is still rolling out Season 5, but the bigger story might be what is happening behind the camera. Gary Oldman just confirmed the show has changed hands creatively, and yeah, you can feel it a little.
The Will Smith handoff (no, not that Will Smith)
Oldman told ScreenRant that William James Smith — the British writer-comedian who created Slow Horses and ran the show for its first five seasons — has stepped away. Oldman says going from a long-time collaborator to a new team took a beat to adjust. When Will was steering the ship, Oldman could text, email, or hop on a call during early drafts to fine-tune scenes. That easy back-and-forth does not exist yet with the new writers.
Inside baseball, but worth noting: the changeover may be showing on screen. With two episodes out, Season 5 is tracking as the weakest-performing season of the Apple TV+ series so far. Still, Apple has already locked in two more seasons with a new writing team, so the Horses are not heading to the glue factory anytime soon.
How Slow Horses turns seasons around so fast
If you have wondered how this show has moved at a pace other streamers rarely hit, Oldman broke down the playbook. Since 2022, Slow Horses has delivered four full seasons, with a fifth currently rolling out weekly. Somehow, it has done that without a major dip in quality — the series even picked up an Emmy along the way.
Oldman says they grind for 9-10 months on a season and, at the same time, are already scouting directors and lining up additional writers for the next one. The mission is to avoid the two-year dead zones that kill momentum for a lot of shows.
"We get to really know these characters. We enjoy these people that come into our living room once a week, and then the show ends, and you have to wait two years for it to come back — an example would be Severance. If the audience likes the show and invests their time in it, we want to come back and deliver. That was the thinking: get a quicker turnover."
Even with a softer start this season, critics are still pretty high on Slow Horses compared to most of what is out there. And with four episodes left, there is room for a turnaround.
What to expect in Season 5, Episode 3
After Episode 2 escalated threats from multiple angles, the Slough House crew has to get proactive fast. Episode 3, titled 'Tall Tales,' splits the team in two to cover separate campaign events and minimize risk. Meanwhile, Flyte digs into Roddy Ho’s new girlfriend, trying to figure out if she is a classic 'honey trap' tied to a potential intel breach. Expect the show to circle back to that car explosion on the street too — are the bombings coordinated, who is orchestrating them, and how does any of it connect to the earlier sabotage and mass shooting?
Quick hit: Episode 2 details
- Season 5, Episode 2: 'Incommunicado'
- Director: Saul Metzstein
- Major cast: Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Saskia Reeves
- IMDb score: 8.1/10
- Streaming: Slow Horses is currently on Apple TV+ (US)
Curious where you want this season to go next? I am hoping the split-team gambit pays off and we get some clarity on the bombings — and soon.