I don’t know what it is, but I like it. That, I think, is the fairest summary I can give to Ponies, the weirdly joyful and bizarrely endearing espionage thriller cum female buddy caper set in 1970s Moscow – filmed like a 70s movie (wipe screen! Split screen! Yellow typing across screen!), written with a modern feminist sensibility, and split over eight parts for TV.
Fans of John le Carré should be warned that this new series, from Susanna Fogel (who also directs four episodes) and David Iserson, has none of the revelling in depictions of tradecraft that stories in his tradition usually prize. The setup is almost embarrassingly absurd and dealt with as swiftly as possible – nothing to see here, just accept it and move on to the good stuff! – as the wives of two dead CIA agents persuade their husbands’ boss to take them on as spies, on the grounds that the KGB will never suspect that women have been recruited. It is my understanding that the real KGB were many things, but not as thick as mince, so I am glad our widows are fictitious.
They are a pair of ponies, you see – Persons of No Interest. You may, at points, have a fleeting suspicion that someone came up with or read about the acronym first (I have no idea if it really exists) and engineered the drama from there, but I would recommend that you let it remain fleeting. There’s much more fun to be had that way.
The gals’ real motive in joining the CIA is not to further American interests during the cold war, but to find out how their husbands really died. Personally, I think it was something to do with the Russians, and the men’s work for the CIA, but this thing may yet turn into a sci-fi adventure or gothic horror, so I’m willing to keep my mind open. Let’s meet them properly, anyway.
Bea (Emilia Clarke, in only her second main TV role since Game of Thrones) is a Wellesley-educated daughter of Belarussian emigrants who moved to the US after surviving the Holocaust. She therefore speaks fluent Russian and can pass as a Moscow native. Quite unlike her fellow widow and partner in espionage, Twila (Haley Lu Richardson); brash, blue-collar American through and through, who married her husband to escape life in a hardscrabble town and leave her unloving mother and horrible stepfather as far behind as possible.
Book smarts, meet street smarts. But the trait pairings also include people-pleaser meets takes-no-prisoner-er, natural charmer meets emotionally sealed F-bomb dropper and many others. To those ends, it is a good job that Clarke and Richardson are both absolutely terrific and that their chemistry makes them even greater than the sum of their parts. They are an odd couple and no mistake.
The ladies are given their cover jobs by boss Dane (a faintly bewildered-looking Adrian Lester, possibly wondering why he is being underused in another good project). Bea, because of the brain, refinement and charm, is reappointed to her post as secretary to US cultural attache Alan (the ever comic and dramatically rewarding Paul Chahidi), while Twila must type and shorthand for a berk and deal with his current secretary, Cheryl (Vic Michaelis). She and Twila did not take to one another during a previous stationing in Vietnam. “It was my own personal Vietnam,” Twila says to Bea, which is about when I decide I am all in on this thing. I don’t need the subtle moral ambiguities of The Americans, the granular depictions of 70s Russia or quadruple-bluffing switchback plotting if you’re going to make me laugh and love you.
Soon, they are off on assignments designed to turn their husbands’ former asset Sasha (Petro Ninovskyi) to the American way. Bea gets embroiled with a baddie called Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz) and Twila learns to think, as well as go on instinct. Plot happens, but the pleasure of the show is in the deepening friendship between the women. Maybe it shouldn’t work but it does. It’s a mashup of genres and tropes, but it is its own thing too – and an unexpected treat at that.