'The baddies reflect the worries of today': How TV spy thrillers are booming in an age of distrust

'The baddies reflect the worries of today': How TV spy thrillers are booming in an age of distrust 2 days ago Laura Martin Netflix From Netflix mega-hit The Night Agent to Apple TV+'s beloved Slow Horses, tales of secret agents and sinister plots are becoming ever more popular again. Philip Stone, head of publisher account management at Nielsen BookData, tells the BBC that, as well as it being boom times for the crime genre as a whole, such a huge uplift in sales of spy thrillers in particular is "in part due to the success of the adaptation of Mick Herron's Slough House series" – the basis for Apple TV+'s Slow Horses. Apple TV+ Slow Horses is based on Mick Herron's Slough House series, which has driven a new surge for spy literature Joseph Oldham, lecturer in communication and mass media at the British University in Egypt, and author of 2017's Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State, tells the BBC that there are parallels between the current spy thriller boom and other eras where the genre has especially thrived, such as the run-up to World War One, pre-World War Two and the early Cold War. Netflix The agents in Black Doves work for a private intelligence service – making it a very 21st-Century spy story Additionally, they've been notable for their moral ambiguity – so while characters like Killing Eve's Villanelle, The Day of The Jackal's The Jackal or Black Doves' Sam Young are hired assassins, there’s something alluring about them that even, perversely, has the viewer rooting for them, as the lines between hero/villain become blurred yet again.