‘Slow Horses’ Season 6 Is an Energetic Return to Form. Plus, Chuck Klosterman!

Key takeaways

• Season six benefits from a new visual language under director Adam Randall and showrunner Gabby Chiappe: more handheld camera work, washed-out skies, and constant rain that mirror a London (and a spy service) in visible decay, replacing the show's usual clean, comedic set-piece look.
• The hosts argue the ensemble finally clicks into "harmony": Roddy's one-liners are dialed back from full sitcom mode, Jackson Lamb's grotesque shtick is toned down a notch so he doesn't dominate every scene, and River Cartwright gets real emotional stakes (including his grandfather's offscreen death) instead of just repeating his "I want out of Slough House" complaint.
• A season-opening "code black" sequence, where agents go dark and scatter to safe houses after an assassin (played by Kyle Soller) starts killing ex-Slow Horses, is cited as proof the show can raise real stakes without abandoning its tone; Hugo Weaving's Harkness character returns at the episode's end as a bigger existential threat.
• Klosterman explains "Rock" required him to write "a nonfiction history of rock and then reverse virtually everything," treating absurd outcomes (the Velvet Underground becoming the biggest band on earth, Led Zeppelin flopping while Steely Dan's career stays identical) as mundane facts a reader should already accept, the way real history books don't flag Reagan's presidency as strange.
• Klosterman ties the book to his "slow cancellation of the future" theory: because technology now lets listeners access all music instantly rather than moving through it in sequence, culture no longer builds forward like a river—it recycles, which is why 2026's biggest records don't sound alien to someone from 2006 the way 1999's would have to someone from 1979.
• He also connects the shift to economics and recording technology: the removal of studio "mistakes" (like the two-year perfectionism behind Steely Dan's "Gaucho") strips out the humanity that once made records feel irreplaceable, contributing to why some listeners feel disconnected from new music even when it's objectively good.

Notable moments

• "This show fucking rips again," Greenwald says after watching the season six premiere, contrasting it with his lukewarm feelings on seasons four and five.
• Ryan notes the show has "always been a B to B plus" for him until this episode, when it jumped several grades.
• The hosts flag the code-black safe-house sequence as a genuine tonal escalation ("stakesier and less clever," in Greenwald's phrase) that still lets Harkness's return land as menacing rather than campy.
• Klosterman on the book's method: "I had to essentially write a nonfiction history of rock and then reverse virtually everything."
• On why some bands succeed and others don't: Klosterman calls it a "weird kind of third rail" between marketing, chance, and retroactive narrative-building.
• He recalls learning "disco sucks" as a kid from a school newspaper illustrated with a photo of ABBA, then noting nobody remembers ABBA that way now.
• Klosterman on avoiding all advance info about the new Nathan Fielder movie: "I really crave that still and it's so hard to do... it's so hard to have experiences like that now."
• Discussing blogging's effect on writing culture, Klosterman suggests it "made people less able to write and possibly read books"; prompting Ryan's dry "Well, I apologize for blogging."

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