Slow Horses season 6 airs in just two days on Apple TV, arriving on Wednesday, Sept. 16. It’s an often-overlooked series that lands yearly Emmy nominations for Best Drama and Best Actor (Gary Oldman), but it’s not exactly the talk of the town when it airs, no matter how good it is. And it is always good.
Slow Horses just set a record as the show with the best Rotten Tomatoes score for any series with 5 or more seasons on Apple TV, given that season 6 just came in with a full 100%. That puts it just above Trying at a 97%. Shows like Severance and Pluribus has 95% and 99% scores, respectively, but far, far fewer seasons, obviously. Here’s the list.
- Slow Horses (6 seasons) – 98% critic score, 88% audience score
- Trying (5 seasons) – 97% critic score, 90% audience score
- For All Mankind (5 seasons) – 91% critic score, 75% audience score
- Servant (4 seasons) – 90% critic score, 78% audience score
- Ted Lasso (4 seasons) – 89% critic score, 82% audience score
- The Morning Show (4 seasons) – 69% critic score, 43% audience score
Slow Horses is not just setting a record for Apple TV. We can actually head to a list that contains all TV shows, where it is not the number 1 show, but it is tied, which is its own wild accomplishment.
- Slow Horses (6 seasons) – 98% critic score, 88% audience score
- Better Call Saul (6 seasons) – 98% critic score, 96% audience score
- The Americans (6 seasons) – 96% critic score, 94% audience score
- Bojack Horseman (6 seasons) – 93% critic score, 95% audience score
Past this, you can get into high-scoring shows, but with fewer seasons like Dark Winds (4 seasons, 100% score) or Succession (4 seasons, 95% score). All time classics? Breaking Bad has a 96% score on 5 seasons. The Wire has a 94% on five seasons. The Sopranos has a 92% on 7 seasons. Game of Thrones has an 89% on 8 seasons (yes, the final season tanked that).
Slow Horses is certainly not as virally popular as some of its competition, but it consistently pumps out fantastic seasons year after year, and I do mean year after year, as unlike most of these other series, it airs with 1 year gaps, or sometimes less, between every season. It gets endless greenlights that allow it to film quickly, and it also helps the seasons are 6 episodes each.
In addition to Slow Horses returning this week for season 6, the show has also been in the news as one of its stars, Jack Lowden, has been rumored to be very close to being cast as the new James Bond, which would certainly be ironic given that he’s already been playing a spy for the duration of his current series. Nothing official on that front yet, but his co-stars are all pulling for him.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
