Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For such a diminutive figure, George Smiley has cast a long shadow over British television. For decades after Alec Guinness played him in the BBC’s 1979 series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, London-set espionage thrillers were stuck in John le Carré’s vision of the cold war. But recently that has changed. Slow Horses has become a hit for Apple with its shabby contemporary take on the secret service, and it is about to be joined by Netflix’s slicker Black Doves. Both carve out new visions for an old genre while tipping a hat to the grandmaster.Black Doves creator Joe Barton has made a career of subverting genres, notably ending his remarkably original 2019 crime thriller Giri/Haji with a sequence of interpretive dance. And yet he still feels Smiley’s inescapable presence.“The ghost of le Carré is always over your shoulder,” he says, “although we’re less classical and more irreverent without being as bombastic as Mission: Impossible or Bond.” He also recognises the inherent absurdity of the form. “One foot is on the ground, the other way up in the air, because jumping out of buildings is a very silly thing to do.”Slow Horses creator Will Smith, who adapted Mick Herron’s novels about brilliant slob Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his team of MI5 cast-offs, also acknowledges le Carré. “Slough House [the agents’ HQ] feels like a remnant of Smiley’s era,” he says. “Very run down and dilapidated, with the service on the back foot again. And there’s a thrill to Gary having played Smiley [in 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy]. He’s brilliant at internalising, suggesting hinterland and back-story. He’s utterly convincing in both worlds.”Black Doves’ protagonist couldn’t be much further from Jackson Lamb. Keira Knightley stars as ruthless but damaged Helen Webb, who is recruited by Sarah Lancashire’s spymaster Reed and forms a fast friendship with Ben Whishaw’s assassin Sam Young. She also happens to be married to the UK defence secretary, from whom she has been stealing secrets, and becomes embroiled in both a diplomatic crisis and personal peril.“What really clicked with me is that idea of being on the school run, screaming at your kids, then putting that perfect smile on for all the mums at the school gates,” Knightley says. “We all do that every day and Helen just takes it to an extreme. She has many different faces. They’re all true but they’re also not true, which is what I love about spy novels: that sense of characters going through an identity crisis.”While Black Doves shares the blending of high stakes, humour and heart-wrenching trauma with Slow Horses, visually it steers closer to edgy 1970s thrillers, such as Alan J Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy”: Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men. Wide shots and tight zooms emphasise isolation and the feeling of being observed. Barton’s decision to set it during Christmas (“a time when everyone’s slightly losing their minds”) also provides a rare contrast to the cool greys and blues of most spy thrillers and the near-fetishised drabness of Slow Horses.Both series also embrace what Smith calls “the London experienced by people who live here”. Reed’s meetings take place in Balham bingo halls and Croydon car parks, while Slough House sits in a drab building which Herron used to pass on his commute from Oxford to the Barbican, wondering: what happens in there? This new wave of capital-set spy series has not come completely out of nowhere. The past decade has given us Channel 4’s Traitors and the BBC’s The Game, two solid cold war thrillers clearly indebted to le Carré. There has also been the occasional outlier: 2015’s London Spy was a Ben Whishaw-starring mini-series presenting a hallucinatory fictionalisation of the 2010 murder of Secret Intelligence Service operative Gareth Williams. And, before that, the long-running Spooks (2002-2011) brought the propulsive plotting and high-octane thrills of 24 to fictional MI5 offshoot the Grid.Black Doves skews closer to the latter, with rapid hacking — rather than painstaking spycraft — employed to move the story along, a stark contrast to Slow Horses’ preoccupation with human ineptitude, tech malfunctions and flatulence. Not that this too can’t be used as a weapon.“When Lamb farts it can be a sign of disrespect, or to throw someone off or to confuse them,” Smith laughs. “Whenever he’s gratuitous, whether through farting or being a terrible bully, there’s a strategic reason behind it.”This is typical of a series that not only addresses things going awry — as they must in an effective spy thriller — but of the emotional and physical mess inherent in this loneliest of trades. “Everyone is sent to Slough House because they’ve fucked up,” says Smith. “Everyone has an instant back-story you want to know about, but they’re all lonely and all alone. In Mick’s books, they felt more like literary characters than genre characters because there’s a truth and an ache to them.”Black Doves’ Helen and Sam are also lonely and adrift. He cannot keep anyone close because of his profession, while she is doomed by hers to live an unhappy compromise; they only have each other. And there is another reason for their alienation: they work not for king and country but for the highest bidder. It’s an unusual twist for the genre: for all their maverick tendencies, James Bond, Ethan Hunt and even Jackson Lamb are ultimately patriots.At a time when nation states are increasingly in thrall to big business and tech giants, it feels apposite. A genre that has slipped in and out of fashion in recent decades now uncomfortably reflects a world in which connectivity has increased isolation, and truth and reality are more slippery than ever.‘Black Doves’ is on Netflix from December 5; ‘Slow Horses’ is on Apple TV+, with a new series planned for 2025Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
