You don’t have to speak algorithm to understand why Apple TV might have gone for Down Cemetery Road. It’s based on author Mick Herron’s first series of books. Slow Horses, Apple’s last series adapted from Herron, has been one of the streamer’s biggest hits. Slow Horses is brilliant, but its formula is eminently repeatable – take Herron’s excellent novels with a central character who is dishevelled but larger than life, pack the script with a very British form of wit and snark, set it in a memorable locale and people it with Emmy-bait actors.
And so, just as the fifth series of Slow Horses concludes, we get Down Cemetery Road. As Herron’s readers will know, this time we have swapped genres from espionage to crime drama and we are in Oxford, not London. But in the form of Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson) we have a lead detective who, on reflection, one would very much like to see lock horns with Gary Oldman’s lead spy Jackson Lamb. She is every bit as bright, brilliant, cynical, sarcastic, badly-dressed, unhygienic and unlikely.
