Slow Horses returns today with a six-episode sixth season, one episode a week through 21 October. Apple's press material for it contains a sentence worth reading slowly, because it contradicts itself inside its own punctuation:
"The fifth season earned nine Primetime Emmy Awards, including a nod for Outstanding Drama Series, and nominations for Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden in the categories of Outstanding Lead Actor and Outstanding Supporting Actor, respectively."
It opens by saying the season earned nine Emmy Awards, and then, in the same sentence, calls them a nod and nominations. Both halves cannot be true. The second half is the accurate one.
The nine, itemised
Season five collected nine nominations, split across two ceremonies:
- Four at the Creative Arts Emmys — Jonathan Pryce for guest actor in a drama, plus casting, music composition and sound. All four were decided on 5 and 6 September. It lost all four
- Five at the main ceremony — Outstanding Drama Series; Oldman for lead actor; Lowden for supporting actor; Saul Metzstein for directing "Scars"; Will Smith for writing the same episode
Four plus five is nine, which is where Apple's number comes from. Nine nominations. Not nine awards.
The construction is not a lie — the nominations are real and the sentence does say "nominations" before it ends. It is a sentence engineered so that a reader who stops after eight words comes away with a different impression than one who reads all thirty-five. Most readers stop after eight words. So does most aggregation, which is why the figure is now circulating as a win count.
And it adapts two novels, not one
The other thing preview coverage keeps getting wrong is smaller and more checkable. Almost everything describing season six says it adapts Joe Country, the sixth book in Mick Herron's series — neat, sixth season, sixth novel.
Apple's own material says otherwise: the season is adapted from Joe Country and Slough House, the sixth and seventh novels. Two books, six episodes.
That matters for anyone tracking the adaptation's pace against the source, because it means the show has now burned through seven novels in six seasons and is running ahead of where the tidy mapping suggests. A seventh season is already ordered, based on Bad Actors.
What the record actually is
Across five seasons, Slow Horses has become one of the most reliably nominated dramas on television and has converted remarkably few of those nominations. Gary Oldman has never won an Emmy for playing Jackson Lamb. Neither has Lowden for River Cartwright. The show has never taken Outstanding Drama Series.
That is a genuinely interesting position for a series to occupy — permanently respected, permanently in the room, permanently going home without the statue. It is a more distinctive story than "won nine Emmys," and it happens to be the true one.
Six episodes, weekly, finishing 21 October. Whatever happened at this week's ceremony, the nine that Apple is advertising were nominations when the sentence was written.