The British are unrivaled champions of failure, perhaps because in elite circles, success, or the flaunting of it, is considered tacky. Some of their best fictional characters are deliciously bad company—take the eponymous heroes of Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis’s 1954 novel, and Butley, a 1971 play. Slow Horses, an excellent British espionage series based on Mick Herron’s novel of the same name, adds Jackson Lamb to the pantheon of losers. Gary Oldman plays Lamb, a drunken, slovenly, and hate-filled MI5 agent in charge of Slough House, a grubby office that serves as a rubber room for spies who failed in the field but cannot be fired. Lamb is cruel, insulting, and determined to keep his misbegotten charges from doing any meaningful work. A shocking terrorist act in London nevertheless pulls Lamb’s pariahs back in the game—despite the best efforts of his old rival, Diana Taverner, the bloodcurdlingly cold Deputy Director-General of MI5, expertly played Kristin Scott Thomas. While set in contemporary London, this is an old-school, John Le Carré–style thriller, and all the better for it. —Alessandra Stanley