Slow Horses creator and showrunner Will Smith has explained why a "brilliant" section from Mick Herron's novels will not be included in the upcoming season.
The spy thriller will return to Apple TV+ in September with its fifth season, which sees Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his ragtag team at Slough House investigate a string of terror attacks across the country.
Speaking to Radio Times alongside Herron, Smith explained that the upcoming six instalments would have to alter some of the storytelling techniques used in the 2018 novel London Rules, a change that proved to be a "challenge".
"The challenge we had with that was Mick does a brilliant thing at the beginning where there's an attack, and he writes it [so] you think you're somewhere in the Middle East," he said. "Then you reveal it’s [in] Derbyshire, and that is brilliant. We cannot do that in the show."
"That was pretty much just the vocabulary - I just picked words. I had 'sand coloured' in the first sentence, so that gives a certain kind of impression for the reader," explained Herron, who joked that he included portions that would be "impossible to film" in his recent novels.
Related: Slow Horses star Jack Lowden's "bruisingly honest" and "intense" drama confirms UK cinema release
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"Everyone is suspicious when resident tech nerd Roddy Ho has a glamorous new girlfriend, but when a series of increasingly bizarre events occur across the city, it falls to the Slow Horses to work out how everything is connected," reads the logline for the fifth season.
While season five is yet to air, the future of the series has already been confirmed, with a sixth season - based on Herron's Joe Country and Slough House - being greenlit by Apple TV+ in October.
"Season six sees the Slow Horses on the run as Diana Taverner embroils them all in a fatally high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge," reads a short synopsis, with Apple TV+ creative director Jay Hunt teasing an "acerbic and action-packed adventure".
Slow Horses season 5 premieres on Apple TV+ on 24 September.
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Reporter, Digital Spy George is a freelance writer who specialises in Movies and TV. After graduating with a degree in Film Studies and Journalism from De Montfort University, in which he analysed the early works of Richard Linklater for his dissertation, he wrote for several websites for GRV Media. His film tastes vary from blockbusters like Mission: Impossible and John Wick to international directors such as Paolo Sorrentino and Hirokazu Kore-eda, and has attended both the London and Berlin film festivals.
