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Posted in: Apple, TV | Tagged: Slow Horses
Slow Horses Author Mick Herron Fine with the Apple TV+ Series Changes
Slow Horses is successful for being faithful to the books, but it also makes changes that author Mick Herron approved and even suggested.
Article Summary
- Slow Horses TV series is praised for staying faithful to Mick Herron's beloved spy novels and characters.
- Author Mick Herron approved and even suggested many plot and character changes made for the show.
- Showrunner Will Smith nails the books' mood and tone, prioritizing character fidelity over plot accuracy.
- Character updates like softening Shirley Dander and making JK Coe more mysterious enhance the adaptation.
Of all the shows adapted from books, Slow Horses has been one of the most faithful to the original material. The first seasons of the series each adapted the first books, but no adaptation is ever 100% faithful to the source material. Some of the recent seasons even combined two books together to form the plot of the season. Little things like updating the books' plots by a few years to make them more present to changes to certain characters like the softening of Shirley Dander (Aimee Ffion-Edwards) and the hardening of JK Coe (Tom Brooke) into the most enigmatic and deadly of the slow horses. Author Mick Herron approved of all the changes the series made from the books, and even came up with some of them during the writing process. Herron told The Radio Times that he was always happy for adjustments to be made to the plots as long as that was in place.
"It's done with such enormous fidelity to the characters," Herron said. "Not to the plots, which is not important to me, but to the characters, which is important to me – that the difference is purely one of transmission. Showrunner Will Smith totally, as do the other writers, gets the mood and tone of the books."
In season five of Slow Horses, everyone is suspicious when resident tech nerd Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) has a glamorous new girlfriend, but when a series of increasingly bizarre events occur across the city, it falls to the Slow Horses to work out how everything is connected. After all, Lamb knows that in the world of espionage, the London Rules – cover your back – always apply.
The season sees the return of stars including Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, Jack Lowden as failed Bond-wannabe spy nepobaby River Cartwright, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana "Lady Di" Tavener, while Nick Mohammed joins the cast as Zahar Jaffrey, the London Mayor. Mohammed has said that comparisons between his character and the real-life Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, are inevitable if only because of the colour of their skin, but that the character is based on "lots of different politicians". Whether you think Khan is as self-serving and grandstanding as Zahar Jaffrey is up to you. We should also add that one change Slow Horses made to the books is to make Roderick Ho about three times less awful than he is in the books.
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