With all the grace its outcast ensemble doesn’t possess, Slow Horses has stealthily emerged as one of television’s most consistently superb streaming series. For four years, six seasons, and counting, the Apple TV espionage thriller has conducted a masterclass lesson in form, tone, character, and expeditious production schedules, and it shows no signs of slowing down on any of those counts. Dig a little deeper into Apple TV’s streaming television catalog, however, and one of their most acclaimed flagship shows isn’t the only ongoing adaptation of a Mick Herron book series.
Last year’s Down Cemetery Road, based on the first installment in Herron’s quartet starring private investigator Zoë Boehm, debuted to critical acclaim and sleeper hit numbers. Season 2’s pre-production process has been underway since Apple TV’s renewal announcement in December 2025. Thank goodness, because this is the precise kind of show that deserves to thrive. Developed by Morwenna Banks, an alum of Slow Horses‘ writing team, and starring the spell-binding duo of Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, the eight-episode detective mystery-thriller is a sidesplitting and hair-raising delight with near-limitless potential — a perfect companion to Slow Horses that always stands on its own firm foundation.
What Is ‘Down Cemetery Road’ About?
One ordinary evening, a house explosion rocks a quiet corner of Oxford. The tragedy kills the building’s two adult residents and injures their young daughter, Dinah Singleton (Ivy Quoi). Authorities blame a faulty gas main, but Sarah Trafford (Wilson), a neighboring museum art conservationist and one of the first witnesses to the devastating aftermath, smells something fishy enough to be rancid. The evidence is contradictory and doctored, the hospital rebuffs Sarah’s attempts to visit Dinah long enough to deliver a supportive gift, and Dinah seems to vanish from the face of the earth.
Even once these ominous signs progress to face-to-face warnings, Sarah can’t stop herself from looking for this innocent, helpless girl. She recruits one half of the husband-and-wife duo running the ramshackle Oxford Investigations, Joe Silvermann (Adam Godley) — and his investigation has an immediate high cost. Rather than surrender to a clear threat, however, Sarah and Joe’s wife, the abrasive PI Zoë Boehm (Thompson), take up their side of the hunt with ferocious determination. As their cat-and-mouse pursuit takes them all the way from an Oxford suburb to a Scottish island, they uncover a scenario far more sinister than even their worst suspicions — a corrupt black ops assignment, its origins reaching the highest levels of the British government.
‘Down Cemetery Road’ Revitalizes Detective Mysteries in the Same Way as ‘Slow Horses’
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Image via Apple TVFirst and foremost, it’s almost impossible to go wrong with Thompson and Wilson playing a well-rounded two-hander of this magnitude. Thompson’s Zoë strikes an unapologetically electrifying figure from the shoulders of her faded black leather jacket to the soles of her trusty Doc Martens. A messy, caustic, and foul-mouthed antiheroine whose riotously withering one-liners make everyone in the vicinity want to crawl into their own graves, Zoë fails to be as emotionally impenetrable as she carries herself, and is all the more endearing for it.
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Wilson’s effortless charisma enlivens Sarah from a stereotypical concerned civilian in over her head to a multifaceted and thoroughly capable woman. Like the most successful amateur detectives, Sarah’s unique skill (art restoration) ensures she notices minute details and inconsistencies. She dashes headlong past warning signs like a damsel in distress might, but she’s quick-thinking and self-sufficient, stubborn and compassionate — a bored risk-taker who either thrives off adrenaline or soars once she frees herself from her stifling life. Together, Zoë and Sarah’s buddy comedy chemistry utterly crackles. Thompson and Wilson make magic together, landing in that opposites-attract sweet spot between awkward, exasperated, and begrudgingly respectful.
Down Cemetery Road shares obviously recognizable DNA with its sister series without feeling like a less inspired copy of its predecessor. Rather, it revitalizes the traditional mystery structure the same way Slow Horses injects fresh adrenaline into the espionage genre — an iron-clad formula replete with Herron’s signature dry wit, riveting cloak-and-dagger intrigue, white-knuckled twists, exhilaratingly grim action, and a small gathering of misfits and malcontents waging war against bureaucrats and politicians. By the time every disconnected piece neatly fits into the correct order, Down Cemetery Road blossoms into a compact, dazzling variation on its creator’s greatest refrains.
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