It’s hard out there for television’s fictional female spies. They’ve got to be just as smart, cunning and one-step ahead as their male counterparts. Plus, they usually must do it in heels. Sadly, the TV Academy has a hard time taking notice of this. Sure, Barbara Bain had a good run of it in the 1960s when she won three back-to-back lead drama actress Emmys for her work as fashion model/covert op Cinnamon Carter in the “Mission: Impossible” series on CBS. And Claire Danes won the category twice for her work as the troubled and trouble-finding Carrie Mathison in Showtime’s “Homeland.”

Sandra Oh never won for playing an MI5 agent in BBC America and AMC’s “Killing Eve,” even if Jodie Comer did take home one lead drama actress Emmy for playing her assassin counterpart. And Keri Russell never won for playing Elizabeth Jennings, the smarter half of a team of KBG operatives living among us in FX’s “The Americans.” The actresses from Apple TV’s “Slow Horses” have never even been nominated, even though the show and some of its male talent have.

Funnily enough, the Academy’s history of minimal recognition is an almost meta nod to the whole plot of “Ponies.” Peacock’s 1970s-set spy show puts two unassuming American women (Emilia Clarke’s studious Beatrice “Bea” Grant and Haley Lu Richardson’s street-smart Twila Hasbeck) right where our government thinks they’d be least suspected: Cold War-era Moscow. These characters are young widows and are thought to be “persons of no interest” to anyone running surveillance. But, thanks to some spy 101 training learned on the go and a bit of accent work from Clarke’s Bea — this is a show where a British actress plays an American who sometimes poses as a Russian — they uncover dirt about both countries, dabble in art forgery, meet some new paramours and maybe even save some lives.

Peacock is also switching tactics from past channels’ campaigns for espionage series. “Ponies” is submitted for comedy consideration — a fact that might be the show’s biggest covert operation yet. And there are funny moments. “Better Call Saul” star Patrick Fabian appears briefly with a horrible toupee as George H. W. Bush. Nicholas Podany and Vic Michaelis became fan favorites for their work as the unassuming and mustachioed mid-level CIA agent Ray Szymanski and his wife Cheryl, a member of the office support staff who runs her ship like she just grabbed the baton from “Mad Men’s” Joan Holloway. Lead characters Bea and Twila themselves are often operating at a level that epitomizes the word “dramedy.”

But this is a show that should be taken seriously. Other supporting players include Adrian Lester as Dane Walter, a handler who barely bothers to shrug off news that, sometimes, sacrifices must be made. Lili Walters brings a pragmatic survivalism to Ivanna, a Muscovite who’s learned how to work the system, while Petro Ninovskyi’s fellow native Russian, Sasha Shevchenko, is clearly, and understandably, scared out of his mind about the espionage world he’s voluntarily entering.

And then, of course, there’s Harriet Walter’s Manya Caplan. A Russian-born Holocaust survivor, Manya is protective of her granddaughter Bea because she knows there’s no way Clarke’s character can truly fathom what she experienced (i.e., Bea’s shocked face when she casually mentions a harrowing experience with an officer in the Russian People’s Liberation Army: “When was I going to tell you that story? While I was dropping you off at horseback riding camp?”). It helps also that Walter herself does speak Russian. Manya gets some closure in the season finale, when she returns to her village for the first time since the war and manages to reconnect with her childhood friend. Manya wouldn’t appreciate my describing them this way, but the scenes are emotional.

None of these things are particularly funny. But maybe it takes going in disguise as a comedy for these heroines to get the job done.