‘Down Cemetery Road’ Review: Emma Thompson Shines as a Razor-Tongued Gumshoe in an Apple TV Drama with ‘Slow Horses’ Vibes (if Not ‘Slow Horses’ Consistency)

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For a series about misfit intelligence operatives doggedly refusing to live up to even the lowest level of their potential, Apple TV’s Slow Horses is remarkably self-actualized.

Every year, come rain or shine or strike or global cataclysm, Slow Horses delivers a new season. Each season thus far has been six episodes, with those episodes usually averaging 45 minutes, durations that have yet to feel too long or too short. Seasons have dealt with weighty, headline-ripping topics and they’ve killed off several beloved characters, but Will Smith and his creative team have always known the precise quantity of humor necessary to protect Slow Horses from ever being either ponderous or frivolous.

Slow Horses isn’t always one of my favorite shows — the fungibility of its storylines, contributing to a sense of interchangeability of seasons, is both a feature and a bug — but if you asked me for a prototypical example of a TV show that knows precisely what it wants to be, Slow Horses would be my answer.

That’s a high (and specific) bar, and if Apple TV’s Down Cemetery Road wasn’t based on a novel series from Slow Horses author Mick Herron, wasn’t adapted for TV by Slow Horses veteran Morwenna Banks and didn’t, in spots, feel an awful lot like Slow Horses, I wouldn’t make the comparison at all.

In its first season, Down Cemetery Road struggles with exactly the structural elements that seemed to come so naturally for Slow Horses. At eight episodes, most running over 50 minutes, Down Cemetery Road feels consistently padded and, especially in its first half, the momentum meanders in frustrating ways. The comedy, often quite broad, is occasionally jarringly incongruous, and the dramatic stakes of the season-long arc sometimes vanish entirely. There’s probably a great six-episode season hiding within this opening run, but it isn’t the version of the show that’s finally airing.

The flaws in Down Cemetery Road are not insignificant. But when you have a show built around the perfectly cast Emma Thompson, instantly whetting appetites for adaptations of the next three Herron-penned Zoë Boehm mysteries, and a top-notch supporting ensemble led by Ruth Wilson and breakout Fehinti Balogun, the flaws become minor irritants and not dealbreakers. (Actually, Wilson isn’t really part of the “supporting” cast. She’s more like the star, even if the ongoing series of books continues following Thompson’s Boehm and not Wilson’s Sarah Tucker.)

Sarah is an Oxford-based art restorationist, living largely in the shadow of her dithering husband Mark (Tom Riley), a mid-level financier more interested in his professional mobility than paying attention to whether his wife is personally fulfilled.

Mark expects Sarah to play perfect wife and hostess for a potentially large client, the insufferable Gerard (Tom Goodman-Hill), and she dutifully orchestrates a small and awkward dinner party that’s upended when a neighboring house explodes.

Authorities say “gas leak,” as they tend to. But Sarah is fixated on the disaster, in which two people were killed and a small girl was hospitalized and then vanishes. Self-conscious about her own childlessness, Sarah latches onto a single, earlier meeting with the girl and her now-deceased mother, and when she accidentally stumbles into a private investigator’s office she sees the chance to get to the bottom of things.

The investigator whose name is on the door is Joe Silverman (Adam Godley, excellent in a brief role), but it instantly becomes clear that the brains of the operation is Joe’s estranged wife, brash and brassy Zoë, with her spiky silver hair and snazzy leather jackets and no interest in the job’s more social aspects.

Sarah is in way, way over her head. The explosion and the girl’s disappearance are tied to an elaborate and confusing conspiracy that involves a shady, unnamed government agent (Darren Boyd); his bumbling underling (Adeel Akhtar’s Hamza); a menacing assassin named Amos (Balogun); and a mysterious man (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, plagued by an underwritten role) who keeps popping up in Sarah’s life with ambiguous intent.

What follows is an odd road trip across the U.K. with some folks trying to rescue the girl and unravel the conspiracy, and the bad guys trying to, um, keep those things from happening.

A lot of what is unwieldy about Down Cemetery Road stems from the source novel, which predates the Slough House series and showcases a writer with an exceptional gift for dialogue and characterization but a more nascent sense of rudimentary storytelling.

On its surface, Down Cemetery Road fits into a meddling amateur gumshoe genre — think The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window and Sharp Objects among others — in which a generally adrift main character (usually a woman, usually played by Amy Adams) attempts to solve a mystery that generally mirrors the aspects of their own lives that have left them without purpose.

Sarah has a useless husband and a useless job. The latter fact is odd, because in the book she has no job at all; the art restoration gig here is a job, but it’s still useless. She also has a confusingly explained and depicted past trauma. The missing girl and the investigation give her an objective, or at least a clear-eyed sense of her strengths, perhaps for the first time.

Zoë, in contrast, knows her strengths, but she’s been content to let her husband be the frontman for the agency. Now she has to come to terms with the state of her marriage and whether or not it’s too late to have larger professional aspirations.

But the conspiracy they’ve plunged into is perfunctory, and the entire story is populated by red herrings, whole characters who exist to make you think they’re important only to vanish very quickly, often never to be discussed again. It’s two women trying to save a young woman and constantly being interfered with by mediocre men who are at best vestigial and at worst murderous.

Unlike Slow Horses, in which everything is essential and nothing is filler, Down Cemetery Road spends four episodes introducing you to things that are entirely filler. One might easily reach the midpoint in the show unable to say what it’s actually about, what anybody is trying to do and what difference it would make if Sarah and company fail in their mission. It’s extremely lax, albeit frequently by design.

Then the last few episodes become a series of set pieces in which our characters are split into three or four groups heading for common destinations, and solid suspense develops from the intercutting, taking the place of any real urgency. It helps that, as the conspiracy threatens to come undone, the man in charge (Boyd makes for a terrifying and catty government suit) stops turning to the floundering Hamza (Akhtar is funny but sometimes in a different way from the rest of the show) and unleashes Amos.

Balogun, who stole scenes from Ewan McGregor in Paramount+’s A Gentleman in Moscow, has a smooth, searing confidence, mowing through extras and secondary characters with vicious efficiency. There are shades of a more stylish Terminator to Amos’ ruthlessness, but Balogun never loses track of the mixture of human pain and professionalism that drives him. You can’t take your eyes off of Balogun, and it will be interesting to see what casting directors do with him once the show puts him on more radars; he’s a star, though what type of star remains to be seen.

He also manages to steal the show out from under Thompson, but with a part this juicy, that’s only an almost. Zoë has a lot in common with Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, only with a stronger sense of fashion and less flatulence. Zoë suffers neither fools nor even the generally competent, and there are few actors, if any, whom you’d rather watch verbally eviscerate people for eight straight hours. But Thompson is every bit as good in the quieter moments, like when she recites the Philip Larkin stanza that gives the show its title.

Thompson is perfectly paired with Wilson, an actor who can go from disheveled wallflower to calculating plotter to deer-in-the-headlights comic fighter with a widening of the eye or twisting of the lips. It’s no surprise that Down Cemetery Road is at its best when Thompson and Wilson share scenes, but it’s odd that in expanding Zoë’s profile for the series — the book is closer to 80 percent focused on Sarah — Banks and her writing team didn’t give them more time together.

It’s the odd choices that keep Down Cemetery Road from living up to its full potential, from telling a story that feels like it’s building to something instead of stumbling around finding itself, even if that’s what its main characters are doing.

Still, the teaming of Thompson and Wilson, together and separately, was a choice as well — one that pays off in planting the seeds for further adventures (maybe or maybe not involving Wilson’s character) that might come closer to that Slow Horses level of self-actualization.