Apple TV's 'Slow Horses' Returns for Season Six With New Showrunner — and a Season Eight Already Locked In

The sixth season of Slow Horses, the Apple TV spy drama built around a squad of disgraced British intelligence officers, began streaming on Wednesday, arriving with a new head writer, two Mick Herron novels compressed into six episodes, and a studio already thinking two seasons past this one.

What happened

The season premiered globally on Apple TV on September 16, with the first of six episodes released weekly through October 21. The show follows a unit of MI5 washouts, run out of a decrepit London office by the foul-mouthed spymaster Jackson Lamb, played by Sir Gary Oldman. Season six draws on "Joe Country" and "Slough House," the sixth and seventh books in Herron's Slough House series, and picks up with the unit on the run as senior officer Diana Taverner pulls them into what the network describes as a high-stakes campaign of retaliation and revenge.

The premiere landed one day after Apple TV disclosed that the series, already renewed through a seventh season, will run for an eighth, adapting Herron's ninth novel, "Clown Town." The announcement means a show now five years into its run has its next three seasons of source material publicly mapped out before this week's episodes have finished airing.

The numbers

Across its first five seasons, Slow Horses has collected 23 Emmy nominations and three wins, according to the Television Academy's official record of the show — two for outstanding directing and one for outstanding writing, with acting nominations for Oldman, Jack Lowden and Jonathan Pryce still unconverted. The show has never won the top drama prize; at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards earlier this month, it lost outstanding drama series to "The Pitt" for a second consecutive year. Apple's own tally, published alongside the season eight announcement, also credits the series with five British Academy Television Award wins and Certified Fresh ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for all five prior seasons, two of them at a perfect 100 percent.

Season six keeps the format that has defined the series since it began in 2022: six episodes per season, each roughly adapting one Herron novel, released weekly rather than dropped all at once. This year is the exception, compressing two books into a single run for the first time.

How the show got here

The season arrives under new creative leadership. Will Smith, who adapted the series from its first episode and wrote or oversaw each of the previous five seasons, stepped back after season five, handing the job to Gaby Chiappe, previously a writer and executive producer on the show. Chiappe made the decision to fold two novels, rather than one, into this season's six episodes, saying the combination "made complete sense" once the writers began mapping the material. Speaking to TVInsider about the choice to open the season with a minor character's death rather than a Slough House regular, Chiappe said the structure "gives you a lovely distance to travel between that thing that you see" and the wider story.

The series is produced by See-Saw Films and based on Herron's novels, which follow British intelligence officers exiled to Slough House, a dumping ground for agents deemed too incompetent, difficult or compromised for front-line service at MI5's Regent's Park headquarters. Herron has published nine novels in the sequence since 2010; the television adaptation has now caught up to within one book of his most recent work.

Who is affected, and the reaction so far

The renewal decision affects an ensemble that has grown steadily: season six's cast includes Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Jonathan Pryce and Hugo Weaving, alongside Olivia Cooke's returning Sid Baker and newcomer Lenny Rush. For Apple TV, the show remains one of the service's flagship dramas and a rare case of a streamer committing publicly to a specific, book-mapped future rather than a vague pickup.

Early reviews of the premiere have been largely positive, with critics noting the tonal balance between comedy and violence that has defined the series. The A.V. Club's review of the opening episode called it a return to what it dubbed the show's "Bummer Season" mode, tracking a killer targeting former Slough House operatives while noting that "River Cartwright will always get himself hurt or humiliated doing something that would have worked in an action movie." Other outlets flagged the same throughline: a slower, grief-heavy opening built around the death of a series regular's grandfather, before the season's action escalates.

"'Slow Horses' continues to charm audiences all around the world and I'm delighted that Jackson Lamb and his gang of lovable misfits will be back for an eighth season. Their acerbic take on the high-octane world of espionage is completely unique." — Jay Hunt, creative director, International, Apple TV

What happens next

Season six's six episodes will roll out weekly on Apple TV through October 21. Season seven, adapting Herron's eighth novel, "Bad Actors," was confirmed in production reports to be targeting a 2027 release, with the newly announced eighth season, based on "Clown Town," expected to follow in 2028. Because "Clown Town" is, for now, the most recent book in Herron's series, a ninth television season would depend on the author producing another novel — a gap that Apple's announcement did not address. In the meantime, the show's fate at future Emmy ceremonies remains an open question: after five years of nominations without a series win, season six's reception over the coming weeks will shape whether voters revisit the show when the next awards cycle begins.