Considering Slow Horses is Apple TV’s most consistently entertaining (and released) series to date, Down Cemetery Road, another adaptation of novelist Mick Herron’s work, begs a reductive but not unfair question: So who plays the Gary Oldman part in this thing? Oldman’s turn as Jackson Lamb is one of the constant joys that brings viewers back whenever the show returns every 11 months or so. And his analog here is very clearly a fellow Academy Award- and BAFTA-winner and part of a loose and exciting group of young London actors in the ’80s: Emma Thompson. In this new show, Thompson’s Zoë Boehm isn’t even remotely as gross as Lamb (or as accomplished of an investigator), but she is indeed the cynical “crusty but benign” one, to quote Network, that Herron has a soft spot for, the kind of snoop who plows past receptionists shouting out “excuse me, you can’t just come in here!” and always seems armed with a quick retort or a “fuck off.” If there is a rebel in this particularly sunny stretch of Oxford, it’s her—which essentially means she has a cool haircut, wears a leather jacket and boots, and likes The Clash.
But one of the surprises of Down Cemetery Road—and there are a lot of them—is that Boehm, unlike Lamb, is neither the show’s best character nor, really, its center. That distinction goes to Sarah Tucker, played by The Affair‘s Ruth Wilson, a meek art conservationist with a fondness for fall sweaters and riding her vintage bike throughout some rom-com-worthy streetscapes to the tune of “Every Time The Sun Comes Up” by Sharon Van Etten. And an even bigger surprise is that, once Sarah enlists the service of a quirky married couple who double as unsuccessful PIs (the brash Zoë and her soft, polite husband, Joe, who’s played by the always great Adam Godley), is how little time they actually spend onscreen together working out the show’s conspiracy. (To give you an idea of how minor league this operation is, here’s Joe’s pitch: “Welcome to our humble detective agency. Runaway teens, GPS tracking, credit checks, missing tortoises—no job too small. Well, not just…I also find cats, cars…missing people?”)
Before Sarah ends up in that shabbily charming office, things start, like they often do in Apple TV shows, with a bang—in this case, a nearby explosion that interrupts a dinner that was becoming very uncomfortable thanks to a cartoonishly dickish, rich-guy guest (portrayed by Baby Reindeer‘s Tom Goodman-Hill). When Sarah tries to deliver a card from a kid neighbor to the little girl who survived that explosion, she’s looked at suspiciously by hospital staff and becomes obsessed with finding out what’s going on and where she might be. But what starts as a missing-child case soon balloons into a bigger government coverup concerning experiments on British troops, bringing Zoë and Ruth to different corners of the U.K., including a ghost island off the Scottish coast that’s littered with landmines and, in a nifty and well-executed bit of suspense building, an overnight train barreling through the north of England stalked by an Anton Chigurh-like assassin.
Like Slow Horses, Down Cemetery Road keeps viewers on their toes, unafraid of killing off a character any other show would keep around. And there are some episode-ending big twists early on that are genuinely surprising, even in this age of twisty-thriller oversaturation, and make you quickly skip to the next one. Also similarly to that Oldman vehicle, this new series is fueled as much by odd-couple comedy dynamics as its central mystery. When Sarah and Zoë find themselves apart for long stretches at a time, they each team up with yet another opposite—the now flightier and chattier former with a no-nonsense, silent soldier whose backstory gives Cemetery a lot of its emotional heft and the latter luddite with a nerdy young hacker. The same can be said for the bad guys pulling some of the strings, including a smooth government bigwig (portrayed wonderfully by Saxondale‘s Darren Boyd) and his shaky, out-of-his-depth suck-up of an underling (tackled by Four Lions‘ Adeel Akhtar). This all could come off like an overused formula if these duos weren’t so often enjoyable to watch, especially when Boyd’s character delivers threatening-with-a-posh-grin lines like “Everything is tickety-boo as the old-fart flannels in this building would say?” as his direct report smiles both dummy and fearfully and then gives a “That’s very good, sir.”
This mixture of comedy and the occasionally gnarly killing (as if to highlight that very dynamic, there’s a memorable bit when a crew is wiped out as a sitcom blasts, with blood splattering against against the TV screen) is also, at points, reminiscent of another recent British standout, Black Doves. And Down Cemetery Road, like that show, has some stylistic flourishes from director Natalie Bailey (who previously helmed episodes of Armando Iannucci’s essential The Thick of It), including an overhead shot of a truly opulent space that’s hiding some truly awful secrets. If there are more shows like this coming down the pike—thrillers with heavy doses of humor, generally fantastic casting (Wilson, it’s worth noting, gives a very good and tricky star performance here), a sizable budget, and some smart narrative decisions (more refreshingly abrupt, life-goes-on endings like this one, please)—viewers should consider themselves pretty lucky.
Down Cemetery Road premieres October 29 on Apple TV
