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Me I don’t know what it is, but I like it. That, I think, is the summation of the justice I can give to Ponies, a surprisingly entertaining and surprisingly entertaining espionage cum buddy caper set in 1970s Moscow – filmed like a 70s film (wipe screen! Split screen! Yellow film on every screen!), written by modern feminist films and eight episodes of TV.
Fans of John le Carré should be warned that this new series, from Susanna Fogel (who also directed four episodes) and David Iserson, has none of the commercialism that his classic stories often enjoy. The preparation is almost shameless and is done as quickly as possible – there is nothing to see here, just accept it and move on to the good stuff! – as the wives of two dead CIA operatives persuade their husbands’ bosses to hire them as spies, saying the KGB will not suspect that women were hired. It is my understanding that the real KGB were many things, but not as thick as mince, so I am glad that our widows are fictional.
They’re ponies, you see – Apathetic People. You may, in some cases, have a momentary doubt that someone came or read the synopsis (I don’t know if it exists) and plan the play from there, but I recommend that you let it be a synopsis. There’s a lot more fun to be had that way.
The real purpose of the gals to join the CIA is not to advance the interests of America 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 work of men in the CIA, but this thing can be turned into a sci-fi adventure or Gothic horror, so I am willing to reserve my opinion. Let’s meet them properly, anyway.
Bea (Emilia Clarke, in her second major TV role since Game of Thrones) is the Wellesley-educated daughter of Belarusian immigrants who immigrated to the US after surviving the Holocaust. So he speaks fluent Russian and could be a native of Moscow. In stark contrast to his widowed wife and fellow spy, Twila (Haley Lu Richardson); brash, blue-collar American through and through, who married her husband to escape life in a tough town and leave her unloving mother and stepfather in the worst possible way.
Book wise, meet wise in the street. But the mix also includes take-no-prisoners, environmentalists meets the F-bomb and more. To that end, it’s a good job that Clarke and Richardson are both incredibly dangerous and that their chemistry makes them greater than the sum of their parts. They are an odd couple and there is nothing wrong with that.
The women are given their cover jobs by boss Dane (a strange looking Adrian Lester, probably wondering why they’re being used for nothing better). Bea, because of brains, innovation and beauty, has been chosen as the secretary of US culture Alan (Paul Chahidi interesting and very profitable), while Twila must write and summarize to start a conversation with her secretary, Cheryl (Vic Michaelis). He and Twila did not take each other for granted during his time in Vietnam. “I was my own Vietnam,” Twila told Bea, when I thought I was in on this. I don’t want American moral ambiguity, 70s Russia-inspired imagery or a quadruple-bluffing switchback plot if you’re going to make me love you.
Soon, they set off to work on turning their husband, Sasha’s (Petro Ninovskyi) fortune into an American one. Bea teams up with a baddie named Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz) and Twila learns to think, and to go instinct. A plot occurs, but the joy of the show lies in the deep friendship between the women. It probably shouldn’t work but it does. It’s a mixture of genres and tropes, but it’s also its own thing – and an unexpectedly fun one at that.
