Stream It Or Skip It?

Ponies, a new period spy dramedy on Peacock, places two women who aren’t spies in the heart of Cold War Moscow. They‘re acting as below-the-radar operatives for the CIA after their husbands, who were agents, die under mysterious circumstances. But what they’re really doing there is trying to find out what really happened to their spouses.

PONIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: Grainy shots of Moscow on December 24, 1976, as if shot with a 16mm movie camera. Shutters click on various CIA operatives and assets.

The Gist:  As CIA agents Chris Grant (Louis Boyer) and Tom Hasbeck (John Macmillan) try to extract a Russian asset out of the country, they’re being chased down and shot at by the KGB. At the same time, their wives, Beatrice Grant (Emilia Clarke) and Twila Hasbeck (Haley Lu Richardson) encounter each other at a market not far from the U.S. Embassy.

Twila, who just returned to Moscow the previous day, helps the tentative Beatrice — whose parents emigrated from Russia, so she knows the language — not get ripped off on a carton of eggs. Twila also seems to know that the ears of the market’s merchants perk up when she insults them in English.

Beatrice, who has multiple degrees, works as a secretary at the embassy, while Twila doesn’t. They both know they’re husbands aren’t attaches or whatever load of bull they’ve been given by the government, so when both are told by their husbands that they can’t make the embassy Christmas party, the women have very different reactions.

During the party, Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), the head of the CIA’s Moscow office, pulls the women aside and tells them that their husbands died in a plane crash. When Bea and Twila both realize that the plane crash is a cover story, they start to wonder just what happened to their husbands.

Back in the U.S., they hatch a plan to get back to Moscow and find out exactly what happened; they go to Walter and tell him that they can be spies for him, given Beatrice’s knowledge of Russian and Twila’s general fearlessness. He says no at first, but runs it by outgoing CIA director George H.W. Bush (Patrick Fabian), telling him that female operatives won’t be noticed at all by the KGB, who seems to have eyes and ears on every male CIA operative in the USSR.

The women are brought back to Moscow — Twila even gets an embassy secretary job as a cover — with the idea that they are PONIes. In other words, they’re People Of No Interest, and they can get intelligence and pass it along while flying under the radar of KGB agents like the savvy and violent Andrei Vasiliev (Artjom Gilz).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Ponies, created by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson reads like The Americans crossed with a ’70s-era empowerment comedy like Minx.

Our Take: Ponies is going to ride on the chemistry and charm of Clarke and Richardson, because the rest of the show is a pretty standard-grade Cold War espionage story. The idea is that these two women — one overeducated, the other overconfident — are flying under the radar to the KGB and will become valuable CIA assets. But they’ll also fumble around, make mistakes, and probably come close to blowing their cover a number of times.

But the overarching story is that they’re going to also find out what really happened to their husbands, which seems like a tall order given the world of subtrefuge they’re entering. It’ll be fun to watch Bea and Twila defy expectations and maybe even their own confidence in their spy skills to pry any information out of either the CIA, the KGB or both.

We can already see how Bea and Twila are going to develop, both individually and as a team; despite their very different backgrounds, their shared purpose and complementary skills will get them leaning on each other as they try to figure things out. And both Clarke and Richardson are up to the task, as they show some pretty crackling chemistry right from their first scene together, as Twila tells Bea to curse the old lady who is trying to rip her off at the market.

None of the other characters, save for perhaps Lester’s Dane Walter, who thinks outside the box and knows that trying to pretend the KGB isn’t watching them makes them more of a target, make much of an impact at first. They seem to be typical ’70s spy characters wearing aviator frames and sporting bad mustaches. Perhaps that will change, but we were mostly focused on Clarke and Richardson, which isn’t a bad thing.

Performance Worth Watching: Haley Lu Richardson is a force to be reckoned with as Twila, but we’re also impressed with just how American the very British Emilia Clarke is as Bea.

Sex And Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Andrei enters the pub where Bea is meeting an asset and Twila is the lookout. He gets a little suspicious when Bea tells him in Russian that she’s a secretary.

Sleeper Star: Harriet Walter plays Bea’s grandmother, Manya. We’re curious to see if she’ll come back into the fold as Bea gets deeper into her quest to see what happened to her husband.

Most Pilot-y Line: The ’70s needle drops were somewhat on the nose, and it seems that Bea likes to play “Hello, It’s Me” by Todd Rundgren over and over as a way to remember her husband. Don’t get us wrong, it’s a great song, but we hope we don’t hear it again for the duration of the season.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ponies has the potential to be a fun Cold War-era spy series anchored by Clarke and Richardson, who shine together and separately in the first episode.

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How To Watch Ponies

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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.