Oldman Fights to Keep Slow Horses on a Yearly Clock

Sir Gary Oldman told an Edinburgh audience on August 26 that keeping Apple TV’s Slow Horses on a yearly clock is a “struggle and a fight.” Season 6 still premieres on September 16, and Season 7 is already filmed.

Apple renewed Slow Horses for a seventh season on July 8, 2025, months before Season 5 reached the service. The star was not leaking a pickup. He was describing the cost of making that pickup feel ordinary.

A Struggle and a Fight, Said in Edinburgh

Oldman collected the festival’s Global Icon Award in Edinburgh during a four-day run that stretched from August 25 to August 28. Festival chair Fatima Salaria had told him the prize was “flattering and frankly alarming.” Television presenter Edith Bowman then walked him through Jackson Lamb, the slovenly MI5 boss he has played since the series launched in 2022.

You invest in these people, these fictional people, and then the show ends, and you’ve got to wait two and a half years.

Gary Oldman, Edinburgh TV Festival

He said the Slow Horses team works to “keep the momentum of the show going,” and that holding quality at the same time is part of the same fight. Most jobs, he said, start with a “low frequency of anxiety.” This one has been the exception for six years, because “the alchemy, the chemistry is working.”

Lamb, he said, “fell from the sky” at the right time in his life. “He has no filter, he is direct, he can’t be arsed with the social norms. That’s the fun of playing him.” The silhouette came from costume as much as from Mick Herron’s pages: a dirty raincoat, a gut built on takeaway, and a man who treats hygiene as optional.

That speech landed as a promise of more seasons. The pickup was already old news. What Oldman was actually defending was the gap, or the lack of one, which is the part of Slow Horses other expensive spy shows have not copied.

Apple Ordered Season 7 Before Season 5 Aired

When Apple announced Season 7, Season 5 was still two months away, dated September 24, 2025. Season 6 had been ordered in October 2024, soon after Season 4 ended. The seventh run would be six episodes, adapted from Herron’s novel Bad Actors, with Ben Vanstone writing and producing and Robert McKillop directing.

Jay Hunt, Apple TV’s creative director for Europe, said the series had won fans with “self-deprecating British humor and high-octane action,” and that she was glad viewers would get more of Oldman’s Lamb “alongside the Slow Horses’ slightly inept spycraft.” In Season 7, Apple said, Lamb’s team tries to find and neutralize a mole at the heart of the British government before the state comes down with them.

By June 2026, Oldman had already wrapped that season and stayed in England to play Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre. He said two more seasons were in the can. The show has long shot runs in pairs, so the next one is often finished before the current one airs, and a trailer for the following season usually rolls right after the finale.

HOW THE YEARLY CLOCK IS BUILT

• Early pickups: Apple orders the next season before the current one has aired, which lets the crew stay in sequence instead of waiting on reviews.
• Paired shoots: Seasons are filmed back to back, so a finished run is often sitting in post while another is on screen.
• Short seasons: Each drop is six episodes, closer to a long film than to a 20-episode network year.
• The stinger: A next-season trailer after the finale keeps the same characters in viewers’ heads instead of letting two quiet years erase them.
• UK filming: London locations and a local production company keep the unit in one country, which is also how the show qualifies for a British screen tax credit.

Shooting fast is only half of it. Other streamers have put two seasons back to back and then sat on a finished one until the marketing calendar opened. Apple has been dating Slow Horses for the autumn and actually playing the tape.

What Six Seasons of Slow Horses Cost

The company that files the British accounts is Jackson River Films, named for Lamb and for Jack Lowden’s River Cartwright. See-Saw Films makes the series for Apple, and Apple Video Programming LLC holds a charge over the production rights. UK filings for the year to June 30, 2025, when Season 6 was filmed, show what a yearly spy season costs when you refuse to wait.

JACKSON RIVER FILMS FILINGS

Those employee counts omit freelancers, who often make up most of a film crew. The UK Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit can return up to 25.5 percent of qualifying local costs if at least 10 percent of core spend sits in Britain. Slow Horses shoots around London, including Regent’s Park and Greenwich, so it clears that bar. The filings say the estimated total cost of the programme stayed in line with the budget.

Apple has been willing to write those checks while other streamers talk about cutting originals. The yearly clock is not a free gift from a lean production. It is a London unit that has now spent hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Lamb’s coat on a hook every autumn.

The Books Still Left on Herron’s Shelf

Herron’s Slough House series of novels is the other half of the factory. Nine main novels are on the shelf, plus novellas set in the same world. The show went one book per season until Season 6, which folds two novels into one six-episode run. Gaby Chiappe adapted that season for television. Adam Randall directed.

BOOK TO SEASON MAP

After Bad Actors, the unused main novel is Clown Town, published in 2025. Oldman, who had just turned 68 when he spoke in June, joked that if the job runs to Book 10, 11, or 12, he will need a walker and a stair lift. Herron has not stopped writing, which is the quiet threat under every early renewal: the show can outrun the books, or the books can keep feeding it.

Two seasons went out in calendar 2022. Every run since has landed in the autumn or late autumn, close enough to a year that the characters do not have to be reintroduced from scratch. That is the whole argument Oldman was making, and the books are why the crew has something ready to shoot when Apple says yes.

On September 16, the Slow Horses Go on the Run

Apple said Season 6 premieres globally on September 16, with one episode a week until October 21. Diana Taverner, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, pulls the misfits into a high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge, and they end up on the run. The first five seasons now streaming stay up for anyone who still needs to catch Lamb before that date.

The returning company includes Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Rosalind Eleazar, Joanna Scanlan, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Tom Brooke, Jonathan Pryce, and Hugo Weaving. Lenny Rush joins. Weaving’s Frank Harkness, River’s father, last slipped away in Season 4. Apple put a first-look clip out in June, then came back on September 1 with a reminder that a new season still starts with Lamb eating something he should not.

It's not a new season of Slow Horses without Jackson Lamb having a little nibble.#SlowHorses Season 6 premieres September 16. pic.twitter.com/Dxq6TMn9Yk

— Apple TV (@AppleTV) September 1, 2026

Apple says all five aired seasons are Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, with two at 100 percent. Over the last two years the series has won Emmys for writing and directing. The yearly habit is how a latecomer can binge five seasons in a fortnight and still sit down on time for the sixth, which is the opposite of a show that vanishes for three years and turns into homework.

Other Hits on the Same Service Wait Years

Oldman’s “two and a half years” was not a hypothetical. Apple’s own Severance left a three-year hole between its first two seasons. Slow Horses has not. After the double drop in 2022, the gaps have sat near a year: roughly eight months from Season 1 to 2, then about a year, nine months, a year, and just under a year again into Season 6.

The quality test people keep citing is not a stunt sequence. In Season 5, Lamb tells a story about a joe tortured by the Stasi, a pregnant woman in the next chair, and a name that never left the man’s mouth. The scene was not in Herron’s book. Oldman had to decide whether Lamb was lying, because Lamb is a spy and a good liar, and then play it straight. At the end Lamb says they never got the name, and the man never knew it. That is the writing the yearly clock is supposed to protect.

Chiappe’s two-book season is the first real strain on the one-novel template. Urbanski, an executive producer, has said the sixth and seventh books were thin enough to combine if the show wanted to keep character momentum. If Season 6 lumbers, the “struggle and a fight” line will sound like an alibi. If it holds, Apple has a spy franchise that behaves like old autumn television while the rest of prestige TV still goes dark for years.

The Dirty Raincoat Stays On

In June, with Season 7 already shot and Season 6 still unreleased, Oldman said that as long as Apple is willing to “keep writing those checks,” he is “not ready to hang up my dirty raincoat just yet.” People keep asking him if there will be more, he said, including one of the royals. Queen Camilla, he added, is a keen viewer.

If I go to Book 10, 11 or 12, I’ll have to be in a walker. They’ll have to get a stair lift.

Gary Oldman, June 2026

Clown Town is still sitting there. Season 7 has no premiere date. Season 6 is dated September 16, weekly through October 21, which is the next turn of the clock he said the team has to fight for.