The Most Enjoyable Binge in Ages

The two best spy series in the business right now are Slow Horses and Black Doves, and it’s not even close. I’m not about to pit them against each other, however. Slow Horses has multiple seasons, Gary Oldman in bad socks, and Jack Lowden. Black Doves has Ben Whishaw and Keira Knightley, brilliant actors both, and they’re arguably not even the best part of the show. That honor belongs to Davies and Williams, the lesbian assassins played by Ella Lily Hyland and Gabrielle Creevy.

What I will say for Black Doves is that it’s the best binge I’ve had in ages. It’s thrilling, it’s emotional, it’s intense, and it’s delightfully unpredictable. The second season, like the first, runs only six episodes, and no other show crams as much into six episodes as Black Doves, except… Slow Horses.

There are some intriguing parallels between the second season of Black Doves and the latest season of Slow Horses, too. On Black Doves, Elizabeth Reed (Sarah Lancashire) has vanished, and members of the Black Doves, a spies-for-hire outfit, are dropping like flies. Over on Slow Horses, former members of the spy organization are also turning up dead.

On Black Doves, the culprit is Sam Young (Whishaw), BFF to Helen Webb (Knightley). He’s picking off members of the Black Doves, the very organization Helen belongs to, because a rival outfit with its own agenda is blackmailing him. The leverage is particularly nasty: If he doesn’t take out the targets he’s been assigned, they’ll blow Helen’s cover, which is no small threat considering she’s married to the new Prime Minister.

So that’s what’s going on in the second season, except there’s so much more to it. The found family of spies (Helen, Sam, Williams, Davies, and Laila, played by Ambika Mod) genuinely sort of care for one another, but at some point this season, nearly every one of them holds a contract to kill another. That’s the game: If they don’t kill their friends, someone else will. There are emotional entanglements, narrow escapes, and so so many bodies. If there’s one category where Black Doves trounces Slow Horses, it’s body count. It might also be the funnier show, or at least its humor is less bone-dry and more laugh-out-loud. Six episodes, a mountain of corpses, and not a wasted minute. Clear your afternoon because, from what I can tell, Black Doves seems to be suffering from that same second-season erosion that hits most Netflix shows these days. With Black Doves, anyway, it might be a marketing issue, but it’s definitely not a quality problem.