Flora Watkins

It’s time to banish binge-watching

Slow Horses made me fall back in love with weekly television

  • From Spectator Life
Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas in Slow Horses (Apple TV+)

It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons in the opening credits with a bottle of Malbec and a Charlie Bigham’s curry to watch the new episode on Apple TV+. (Gen Z readers: at the risk of lowering the birth rate even further, this is what fun looks like in your forties after three kids.)

Weekly episodes now seem quaint, as archaic as a landline or a daily newspaper landing on the doormat

Being late to the party, I binge-watched the first three series of Slow Horses, the darkly hilarious – and multi-Emmy Award-nominated – spy thriller. So when the fourth series, ‘Spook Street’, premiered on 4 September and the first episode didn’t immediately roll onto the next, I was outraged.

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