Slow Horses Season 6 Hits Apple TV on September 16, One Episode a Week Until October 21

Slow Horses returns for a sixth season on Apple TV on 16 September, and the new trailer that landed this morning confirms the run will play out weekly through 21 October. That is six instalments on the usual cadence, not a binge drop — the first episode arrives on premiere day and one follows every Wednesday after it.

For anyone deciding whether to keep or restart a subscription, the maths is simple: the season spans five weeks and a day, so a single month of Apple TV covers most of it but not all of it. Apple charges $12.99 a month in the US after a seven-day free trial.

What is the Slow Horses Season 6 release date and schedule?

The Slow Horses Season 6 release date is 16 September, exclusively on Apple TV. Episodes then land weekly until the finale on 21 October. There is no announced day-and-date cinema window and no physical release attached to the premiere.

• Premiere: 16 September
• Finale: 21 October
• Cadence: one episode a week, six weeks in total
• Where: Apple TV, $12.99 a month in the US after a seven-day trial

What happens in the new season?

The official logline has the Slough House crew on the run after Diana Taverner drags them into what the show calls a fatally high-stakes game of retaliation and revenge. In the trailer, Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb corners Kristin Scott Thomas's Taverner in a garden and asks why his Slow Horses keep turning up dead. Saskia Reeves's Catherine Standish spells out the threat: anyone who has ever worked at Slough House is being targeted.

The headline casting news is the return of Olivia Cooke as Sid Baker, absent since the 2022 first season. Rosalind Eleazar and Joanna Scanlan also appear, and BAFTA winner Lenny Rush joins the cast. Jack Lowden, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Samuel West, Ruth Bradley, Jonathan Pryce and Hugo Weaving all return.

Adam Randall directs. The season adapts another of Mick Herron's novels, scripted by co-executive producer Gaby Chiappe, with See-Saw Films producing. Season 5 is currently up for nine Emmys, drama series among them.

Do you need a separate subscription to watch it?

Yes. Apple TV is a standalone service and the show has never been licensed elsewhere. The app ships on Apple hardware and is also available on most smart TVs, Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast with Google TV, PlayStation and Xbox, plus the web. On Android phones and tablets it runs through the Apple TV app on the Play Store.

Apple also sells a bundle with Peacock at $14.99 a month with ads on the Peacock side, or $19.99 ad-free. That bundle looks different this week now that Peacock's own prices went up, which makes the combined tier the cheaper route for anyone who was paying for both separately.

How does the weekly rollout compare with other autumn shows?

Weekly is the norm again for prestige drama. Lanterns is running one episode a week on HBO Max, and most of the big autumn titles are following suit. Netflix remains the outlier: The Diplomat drops all eight episodes at once on 15 October, which lands in the middle of the Slow Horses run.

The practical upshot for subscribers is that stacking services month by month is harder this autumn than it was last year. A weekly six-parter locks you into two billing cycles unless you time the sign-up carefully. Starting on premiere day and cancelling immediately still leaves you paying twice, because the finale falls five days past the 30-day mark.

Is this the last season?

Nothing has been announced either way. Apple renewed the show well ahead of schedule in past years, and Herron's book series runs longer than the six seasons produced so far, so there is source material left. Anything beyond that is speculation until Apple says otherwise — the same rule that applies to every renewal rumour, including the confirmed second season of It: Welcome to Derry, which was announced on the record.

The trailer is on Apple's own channels now. The premiere is 16 September.