It took me a long time to realize that most spy movies and TV shows are essentially recruitment advertisements for intelligence agencies. The easiest way to identify such agenda-driven stories is if they are sleek or labeled “realistic” and, most importantly, don’t bother critiquing the establishment or the country that they are working for. If the characters are largely neutral on everything that’s going on in their workplace and the rest of the country but go out of their way to find faults in a certain section of society that is anti-establishment, that’s a red flag. If these movies and shows echo majoritarian sentiments, albeit in a “sleek” fashion, that’s alarming as well. And that leaves us with a select few narratives that try to engage with a vast and problematic history of espionage, intel gathering, and “regime change,” while also alarming people about why it’s wrong to be “fans” of the government or intelligence agencies. Some recent examples that have stood out to me are Task and The Copenhagen Test. Can Ponies join this small list of high-quality shows that analyze the government and its branches through a critical lens? Let’s find out.
Susanna Fogel and David Iserson’s Ponies is set in 1977 and follows Bea and Twila as they live in Moscow for the sake of their respective husbands, Chris and Tom, who work for the CIA, whose headquarters are situated in a secret section of the US Embassy. Bea’s relationship with Chris is sweet, and they are clearly in love with each other; meanwhile, Twila’s dynamic with Tom is strained, and it seems like they can’t wait to get rid of one another. Before we can get to learn more about all four of them, tragedy strikes, and Bea and Twila are informed by CIA agents Dane and Ray that both of their husbands have died in a plane crash. They are left with two choices: they can either go back to the USA and restart their lives, or they can stay in Russia, work with the CIA, and try to learn what were the circumstances under which Chris and Tom passed away. Bea and Twila are already associated with the embassy; they are aware of the insane level of surveillance that the KGB is fond of deploying, and they know that nobody will ever suspect them of being spies. With two agents down, Bea and Twila present themselves as their husbands’ replacements. Whether or not this gamble pays off or the ladies crumble under the pressure of extreme espionage is what forms the crux of the story.
There are several movies set in the “everyday person steps into a world of spies” subgenre; for example, The Courier, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and even Kingsman to a certain extent. But as you can clearly see, even when writers have to imagine an “ordinary person” becoming a spy, it has to be a man. Sure, you can say that True Lies and Knight and Day had a woman in that role, but let’s not kid ourselves by denying the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise were hogging the limelight. Hence, it’s pretty refreshing to see a similar scenario but from the perspective of two women. Bea and Twila are incredibly “normie” and American, and to see them try to unpack this world of lies and deceit while dealing with their complex personal emotions is fascinating to watch. The narrative does get a bit listless sometimes, but I feel that that’s sort of the point because, at the cost of sounding repetitive, our protagonists aren’t spies, and they don’t have the required training to thwart the goddamn KGB. Amidst all these shenanigans, the writers take the time to critique how intelligence agencies treat people like pieces on a board that they can move and sacrifice to get the desired outcome. And that compels you to wonder how divided we have become as a species and that we are spending millions of dollars on secret missions to “defeat” each other.
From the get-go, Ponies makes it clear that it has put in a lot of effort into capturing that ‘70s aesthetic. I really like the opening segment of the first episode, where we see all the major characters of the show being surveilled by an unknown entity. I wish they used that as the title credit sequence instead of the generic one they went for. The production design, the cinematography, the editing (big fan of the wipes), the costume design, the hair and make-up, the sound design, the music, and just the overall attention to detail are fantastic, in my opinion. I am sure history experts will be able to point out hundreds of mistakes in regard to the guns, the cars, or the radios that have been featured throughout the show. My opinion on the pacing of the show is mixed. The vibe is darkly comedic; there’s murder and mayhem, but the mood is more or less light. So, forcing almost every episode to cross the 50-minute mark did seem odd to me. When it flows, it flows; when it tries to set up the second season or deviates from the central plot to tie up loose ends that don’t need to be tied up, it gets a bit tedious. There are some brief moments of action that are simply spectacular. And a huge round of applause should go out to the directors for extracting such amazing performances from their cast.
I am a little biased towards the show because of my love for Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson. But my bias is justified because both Clarke and Richardson are absolutely fantastic in Ponies. They are extremely versatile and expressive actors, and I am so glad that they got to show such a wide range of emotions over the course of these 8 episodes. They are the biggest reason why I am being so forgiving about the pacing of the series, because even if things slowed down, I got to see two of my favorite actresses act the hell out of those scenes. Vic Machaelis of Dropout fame is brilliant; the transformation of her character is just mind-blowing. Nicholas Podany, Adrian Lester, and Pal Macsai are really good. Artjom Gilz, Petro Ninovskyi, Clare Hughes, Harriet Walter, Diana Gardner, Tanya Ivanova, Alan Salek, and Nikita Kukushkin are excellent. Louis Boyer and John Macmillan, despite their very limited screentime, manage to be quite impactful. The rest of the supporting cast is splendid; I don’t think there’s a single performance that’s sub-par. All in all, I had a great time watching Ponies. As mentioned earlier, it’s one of those rare stories that’s actually critical of governments and intelligence agencies and asks why we aren’t more humane towards each other. I like where it has left things. I hope that it gets picked up for a season 2, but I am not going to set my expectations too high.
