Down Cemetery Road is the worthy successor to Slow Horses: a review of AppleTV's excellent new detective series

Before achieving success with Slow Horses and the subsequent novels featuring Jackson Lamb, before delivering a major hit to AppleTV with the serial adaptation starring Gary Oldman, early in his career, English writer Mick Herron was the "father" of Zoë Boehm. Down Cemetery Road is his debut novel, now transformed into the second saga of his work, consisting of detective series and standalone mystery novels, which Apple has bet on to capitalize on the success of Slow Horses.

Attempting to adapt another mystery series by a writer who has proven so effective when translated to the small screen might seem an obvious choice, but it's a move that still hides pitfalls. Firstly, because Down Cemetery Road (still unpublished as a novel in Italy) is an early work. This is evident even when watching a series that comes after the success of Slow Horses on TV, which replicates the production and artistic team as faithfully as possible, immediately demonstrating that it has learned what worked. The largely successful challenge is to repeat and capitalize on what has been learned, with its own specific identity that escapes the inevitable comparison.

The identity of Down Cemetery Road is shaped by showrunner Morwenna Banks after writing several episodes of the "main" series. There's a female gaze in how the two protagonists of this story move in public spaces and private contexts. I mean this in an absolutely complimentary way. For example, it's evident in the palpable physicality of Emma Thompson and Zoë Boehm, which is entirely absent in most series written by male showrunners. An approach that immediately suggests that the action is directed by someone who inhabits a female body.

There's no Gary Oldman covered in grease and unwashed for weeks, but there's an Emma Thompson who uses a wet cloth to freshen up, even in intimate areas, and then tells her husband not to use it to wash his face. It might even sound pedantic to talk about "real" female bodies, but try to remember the last time an actress of this caliber and generation enjoyed a night out with a lover where everything wasn't choreographed, softened, or manipulated. Rebel Wilson, on the other hand, is allowed to fall apart when an incident that happens not to her but to someone living a few houses away gives rise to a strange obsession. An incident that leads her to focus on a side of her life she had never even perceived existed, made of lies and deceptions.

One investigator with a brusque approach, immediately ready to put up a barrier of detachment behind which one senses a life of blows taken and returned, the other a wealthy and progressive restorer who barely conceals beneath the surface an almost existential conflict with herself: these are not easy or resolved women that Mick Herron writes and Apple brings to the screen in Down Cemetery Road. They are above all the spark of a series that dares two more episodes than Slow Horses and is full of sharp blows and abrupt turns. Perhaps this adaptation is even more pessimistic than the world in which Gary Oldman's slow horses move. Down Cemetery Road even appears deliberately cruder and more awkward in its investigative part: after all, there are no police or spies involved, but an investigator and an absolute amateur grappling with a case decidedly bigger than them.

Within Cemetery Road, all of Herron's cosmogony is already present, even more pessimistic: having moved from the brutalist Barbican district to sleepy Oxford, Herron's world remains a deeply unjust and classist universe populated by wolves with traumatic pasts, where lambs are easily devoured and even predators are never safe. There is a profound underlying distrust of institutions, which in their very DNA have a system of corruption, omertà, and violence that defends them in the shadows behind clean facades presented to public opinion. Newspapers are unreliable, government affairs tend to be dirty, and betrayal often hides even within affections.

Down Cemetery Road is a dark detective series in which the disappearance of a child profoundly alters the lives of the two protagonists, who spend a good part of the season grappling with the often brutal realizations that the investigation presents to them. From the close of the first episode, the show finds the right balance between the dark vision of reality it proposes and an irony that doesn't make every negative turn seem like a calculated coup, but (and this is crucial) something realistic and even predictable.

Emma Thompson has the thankless task of finding an identity for a character who was later deconstructed and refined into two of the protagonists of Slow Horses: her Zoë is the matrix from which both Jackson Lamb and Diane Taverner emerged. With a post-punk look and a brusque attitude, she doesn't completely succeed in creating an equally strong third character, but she still gives an excellent performance. The real surprise is Ruth Wilson in the role of the wealthy woman and wife overwhelmed by events larger than herself, which bring out a restless side of her past. Her character is the authentically unpredictable one, making the viewing even more engaging.

What's missing here compared to Slow Horses is the mastery with which every character and situation in that series is brought to its maximum potential, making even supporting characters, recurring characters, or past and present intrigues of British intelligence memorable. It is a limitation that the series – populated by despicable bureaucrats and inept henchmen, yes, but very anonymous – fails to remedy compared to its original source. After all, that is the culmination of a writer and character actor of great talent who was still finding his footing in his first Slow Horses novels. The true merit of Down Cemetery Road, besides being another AppleTV series with impeccable production and British-level writing (i.e., very, very high), is that it delivers two great female characters and a compelling story, even if sometimes disheartening in its social commentary. Much, much more than what the average streaming series today can guarantee.