Ponies Is Better As A Buddy Comedy Than A Spy Thriller

The Cold War was largely an exercise in futility. Soviet spies surveilled American agents embedded in Russia; said American agents knew they were being stalked, recorded, and quietly threatened. Stateside, it was the same game of paranoia — and in the end, it’s hard to say what actual fruit was borne of it.

That irony is the one thing — maybe the only thing — that Ponies understands intimately. Peacock’s new spy series treats in the same tropes that any student of the subgenre would know with their eyes closed: The apartment is bugged! There’s a mole in the organization! Such reveals are hardly as interesting as they might have been 20 years ago — even Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), the head of the CIA’s Moscow brand, seems to understand that. “If all the spies on their side and the spies on our side were suddenly gone tomorrow, the world would carry on working just the same,” he astutely observes halfway through the season.

The problem is, Ponies itself leaves you with much the same feeling.

I hesitate to call Ponies a true story about espionage, as it plays so fast and loose with the tropes baked into this framework. Though it’s got David Iserson (Mr. Robot) and Susanna Fogel (The Spy Who Dumped Me), two great alums of the genre, at the reins, the co-creators skimp on the novelty needed to make this latest outing not feel utterly redundant. The myriad twists and turns fueling this eight-episode season don’t make a whole lot of sense, and the parts that do don’t pack much of a punch. What makes Ponies worthwhile at all has nothing to do with its paranoid Cold War setting, though it wouldn’t really exist without it. It’s the chemistry between its two wannabe spies that steers the series away from the same ice-cold well and into the lane of fizzy buddy comedy.

It’s 1976, the height of America’s conflict with the Soviets, when the booksmart Bea Grant (Emilia Clarke) and brassy Twila Hasbeck (Haley Lu Richardson) cross paths in Moscow. Their husbands are both triggermen for the CIA, though their lives are far less glamorous. Bea, despite her education and fluency in Russian, bides her time as a secretary at the U.S. Embassy; Twila, meanwhile, struts around Moscow in Penny Lane coats trying to pawn American wares in city markets. Neither admits it out loud, but each craves a life of excitement, out of their respective husband’s shadow. And they eventually get their wish in the worst way: on the night of the Embassy’s Christmas party, Dale pulls them aside to inform them that Chris (Louis Boyer) and Tom (John Macmillan) perished together on a clandestine mission for the bureau.

If this news affects our heroines beyond the initial shock and sorrow, Ponies isn’t all that interested in showing it — at least at first. The series takes a slower approach in unpacking Bea and Twila’s parallel journeys in grief, and though it may reward us with nuance later, that instinct undercuts any sense of character at the outset. That’s largely because Ponies has a lot of plot to get out of the way first: Bea and Twila eventually take up their husbands’ crusade to become spies in their own right, but it takes a lot of finagling, and some feminist grandstanding, to position them as such.

Our heroines argue that they’re uniquely qualified to join the fight on foreign soil, not only because they’re competent, but because they’re women; officially, Persons of No Interest (or PONIs). No one notices a woman, Twila says, apart from their capacity as a sexual object. It’s a valid point — even if it does land with all the subtlety of an ACME anvil. It’s not the last of Ponies’ broad gestures towards girl power, either, but it does allow Bea and Twila to remain in Moscow, take up their husbands’ crusade, and try to figure out how they died.

Their very first field mission brings them face-to-face with an obvious suspect: Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz), a slimy KGB agent and literal ladykiller who takes an instant liking to Bea. He forms one point of a love triangle that Bea, despite mourning her husband, immediately stumbles into; the other is Sasha (Petro Ninovskyi), a mild-mannered technician who becomes a double agent for the CIA. The push-and-pull between these two different Russian men is compelling: it provides the “sexy” angle that a show of this caliber needs, but it also gives Bea, a consummate pushover, an overdue awakening. Clarke (thanks in no small part to her incredibly expressive eyebrows) is great when exploring Bea’s primness — but as the series progresses and Bea gains a new steeliness, her inner Khaleesi comes out, and it’s never amiss.

Richardson is also in her element broadcasting Twila’s gumption and bravado, but her take on “sassy American” does occasionally veer into caricature. Ponies makes up for it somewhat by forcing Twila to confront her own vulnerability, not so much in her grief over Tom, but in her growing empathy otherwise. While Bea juggles Andrei and Sasha — and investigates the conspiracy that connects them — Twila uncovers a plot involving Moscow’s sex workers, who’ve been disappearing at alarming rates. “It’s all connected,” Twila remarks, because of course it’s all connected. That instinct to interweave only makes this story more difficult to follow; Ponies is only fun when you don’t think about story at all.

Ponies works best as a loose tapestry of spy adventures, while Clarke and Richardson are admittedly better together. It’s the classic odd-couple relationship, just over the background of espionage: Bea inspires Twila to embrace discipline (and to open up a bit more), while Twila encourages Bea to grow a backbone. That transference is slow-going, but the moments of chaos it creates are the show’s highlight. All this espionage feels like a means to an end — even Ponies’ supporting characters, brought in to train our heroines in the art of spycraft, feel like vessels to push Bea and Twila through their development. It’s frustrating, but it’s not a total loss when you focus on all the fun Clarke and Richardson seem to be having. Their conviction saves Ponies from the grave of futility, but it’s not exactly moving the needle otherwise.

Ponies is streaming on Peacock.