How Slow Horses Built the Perfect Asshole

When we first meet Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) in Slow horsesthe camera has panned over the rubble on his desk and sees him waking up with a fart on the couch in his office. It’s a fitting introduction to an unlikely protagonist: Across Slow horses we see Lamb routinely berating, belittling and smearing everyone around him. He is TV’s biggest asshole, as unrepentant as he is vulgar. He is also a perfectly seductive asshole, and one of TV’s best.

The art of creating the perfect anus may not seem that complicated on paper. Evil, as the saying goes, is a constantand often a childish one at that. It’s easy to imagine evil and enact it on screen, however clumsily. But Jackson Lamb isn’t just a bad boss, or even a bad person. Slow horsesan adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House spy series, is always very careful about this, even when he’s just said one of the rudest things you’ve ever heard, whether he’s mocking someone’s addiction, ridiculing his dead husband or endlessly encouraging his employees to quit.

Oldman plays Lamb as a pain in the ass — that is, annoying and restrictive, but decidedly sharp and constantly trying to communicate something deeper. That’s what makes him so incredibly frustrating to those around him: you can ignore him at your peril. But you’ll have to wade through a constant stream of biting remarks to find a pearl of wisdom.

However, the writers of Slow horses are careful to balance Lamb’s sleazy behavior as best they can. That doesn’t necessarily mean toning it down, but rather giving him a strange, sour logic. He regularly offers Standish (Saskia Reeves), who’s been in recovery from alcoholism for years, a drink. Showrunner Will Smith (not that one) says it’s his own way of checking to make sure she’s still on the straight and narrow. (“It’s not the traditional way of checking to see if someone’s sober,” Smith laughs.) Even the smallest joke or fart is there to grate on people’s nerves, test a reaction, throw someone off track or (as is often the case with people in the park) purely to show that he knows more than they do. All the while, he’s playing to expectations and his sleazy behavior, even when he’s just trying to undermine it.

“Lamb is all about minimal effort. He just wants to sit behind the desk,” Smith tells Polygon. “He would never admit that he did the honorable thing — even though he always does. He saves the day; he always saves people. He steps up.”

But the final piece of the Lamb puzzle comes from a very important character choice: he’s not all-powerful, and his backstory doesn’t justify his behavior.

It’s a simple enough concept. But too much pop culture asks its protagonists to feel like good morals before they feel like good characters. Lamb is far from a shining beacon of virtue, but Slow horses is not set up in such a way that you think he should be secretly received as such. He is a bored jerk, someone so hurt by betrayal in his past that he constantly takes it out on those around him. For Lamb, his abuse is a mercy, a way to discourage them from being eaten up in the same way he was. After devoting his life to MI5 and trusting his friend, he has been given a dirty conscience and a foul mouth in return. He didn’t want to be a civilian, but he can’t bring himself to serve the institution either.

Like so many complicated protagonists — and, increasingly, villains — Lamb has good reason to be blasé. It’s a late revelation, harking back to his central wound with what Smith recalls in a single sentence: Years ago, Lamb was ordered to shoot his friend and mentor Charles Partner, and in return he asked for Slough House.

In a way, this is the guiding principle for many seasons of Slow horseswhich inevitably in some way harkens back to how Lamb’s life was destroyed by Partner’s betrayal. But the way we see Lamb lead is mostly just deeper in crassness. He keeps his self-awareness completely to himself. He uses his sharp spy skills to learn things about people in order to weaponize them and sweep them off their feet. Unlike many of these complicated villains (and their heroes), this isn’t so we can better understand how he’s good, really; Lamb’s arc is over and the damage is done.

Still, Slow horses is smart enough to know that even smoking ruins yield treasure. Perhaps the greatest trick of Lamb’s competence is that he is still working hard even if he shakes it off. He doesn’t know everything, he just knows enough. “We always think he’s the smartest guy in the room, but once he gets the hang of it, he lets the Slough Horses do the work,” Smith says. “He doesn’t let people in when he’s ahead of him; he can’t be bothered to explain it to people. So he only lets them in on the parts that are going to motivate them.”

On another show, a weaker show, Lamb could be a dangerously perfect protagonist with this kind of skill set. Instead, he’s the perfect cautionary tale; a completely unlikable guy you still love and would never want to work with; the ultimate asshole. Even after four seasons, Slow horses feels like an exercise in character without the tragic backstory becoming its defining characteristic. It’s what allows Oldman to plant beautiful little moments of hope that shine through all the clutter: you can see the shifts when he shows up at an unexpected crime scene, or clues that a member of his team has gone missing – even Lamb’s profile is defined by Oldman’s drooping body and pulling his head inward to make his frame seem larger than he is. He’s turning into the man he was, the man he still could be, but who he no longer wants to pursue. He can’t help it, just as he can’t help being so broken in the uncaring world of espionage. As Smith says, he’ll always come out – even when he’d rather not have to take his feet off the desk.

Slow horses Season 4 premieres September 4 on Apple TV Plus.