MOSCOW IS A terrible place – or at least that’s what every American who stars in the new espionage series PONIES wants to tell us in the first episode of the series.
It’s 1977, and American women Beatrice “Bea” Grant (Emilia Clarke) and Twila Hasbeck (Haley Lu Richardson) have a friendly meet-cute at a Moscow market where Twila tells Bea she is being scammed. The pair are living in Moscow as the wives of CIA Cold War agents working in the city.
Bea is very happily married to Chris (Louis Boyer), working as a CIA secretary but with plans to return to the US with her husband and pursue her career properly. She’s of Belarusian extraction herself and speaks the language. Twila is her opposite – unhappily married to Tom (John Macmillan), not working, and without many plans beyond staying the hell out of America.
The pair are different in other ways, too, with Twila sporting bright, fun clothing and a mop of curls, while Bea is more conservatively dressed and uptight.
Mysterious deaths
The women’s lives collide for real when both of their husbands are killed in a mysterious plane crash. The CIA won’t tell them what happened, so after a brief trip to the US, they decide to head back to Russia to find out what happened. They manage to convince their husbands’ CIA boss to hire them as spies, with their gender – the fact that no one will think women could be spies, apparently – a selling point.
But as they don’t know anything about being spies, they need to undergo some swift training before being plunged into the world of espionage. Guiding them through it is the serious Dane, played by a great Adrian Lester.
PONIES is a spy thriller that’s more The Americans than any of Le Carré’s fare, but with a whole lot more quirky comedy than the former. It tries to strike a knowing tone (hence the whole ‘Moscow is terrible’ schtick) for an audience that’s already very familiar with how spy thrillers work.
Its creators are Susanna Fogel – one of the co-writers of the excellent Booksmart – and David Iserson, who was behind series like The United States of Tara. Fogel and Iserson wrote spy comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me together, so this is an area they have previous form in, though this is a big step up from that film.
By making two women the centre of the story, PONIES asks both what sort of sexism they will face (a lot), but also how their gender might benefit them. Maybe they will think differently to their male counterparts, or prove people are wrong to doubt their abilities. It mostly succeeds in this, showing that the women can mostly hold their own when up against men trying to outwit them.
Some of the characters are a little broad, particularly Ray Szymanski (Nicholas Podany), who works closely with Dane, and Szymanski’s wife Cheryl (Vic Michaelis). But that broadness brings humour with it.
In turn, plenty of suspension of belief is needed regarding moments in the plot, such as the loud conversations about undercover activities, and the fact that when a character jumps from a high-rise building into a rubbish bin, they emerge unscathed (though this isn’t entirely an unusual thing for thrillers). Twila leans a little too contemporary to feel truly like she’s from the 1970s, yet Richardson’s bright energy means you forgive this.
PONIES has many bad wigs and pulled-off-a-rack costumes, and the needledrops can be a bit too heavy-handed at times. It’s clearly not searching for verisimilitude, instead taking off the 70s in a way that’s digestible for a contemporary audience.
The enjoyment in PONIES comes from the chemistry between Richardson and Clarke, and in watching how the women cope with being asked to do difficult tasks. They’re easy to watch on screen, Clarke’s Russian accent is great, and we do feel invested in their journey.
There are some quibbles about PONIES, and if you’re looking for a granular depiction of actual espionage, you should head somewhere else. And yet the lead actors ground the show by being charming and entertaining, making you believe in their friendship and their ability to make it as independent women in a world that would prefer them in a limited number of roles.
It’s certainly a modern take on a period story, and perhaps not adding anything startlingly new to the spy genre, but it’s great to see Richardson and Clarke in these buzzy roles.
PONIES is streaming on Sky now.