I’m convinced that you could stick Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow into a series about the inner workings of an insurance agency, and they’d still find a way to turn the affair into absolutely riveting TV. No offense, insurance agents.
I’ve come to this admittedly not-so-daring conclusion after being bowled over by their work in FX’s The Old Man, an espionage drama in which both men play grizzled veterans of morally dubious spy wars — Lithgow, as former FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper, and Bridges, as the brilliant and exceedingly deadly former CIA agent Dan Chase. Whenever both actors are onscreen together in The Old Man — which, by the way, just returned to FX for its sophomore season — it’s like watching two masters at work. Each scene, each conversation, each glance between them implies subtext and a backstory, the missing pieces of which are among the many reasons I’ve been glued to this show from the beginning.
Jeff Bridges in FX’s “The Old Man.” Image source: FX Networks
It’s a show, by the way, that also happens to be one of the biggest across the entirety of the streaming universe at the moment.
That’s according to the streaming search engine service Reelgood, the latest weekly data from which finds that FX’s adaptation of Thomas Perry’s 2017 novel of the same name is the #1 TV streaming TV show this week. As of this writing, The Old Man is two episodes in to the new season, which finds Harper and Chase teaming up to recover Alia Shawkat’s Emily Chase after she gets kidnapped by a powerful Afghan tribal leader.
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Reelgood, by the way, monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US, from Apple TV+ to Max, Peacock, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Prime Video, Paramount+, and more. For the 7-day period that ended on Sept. 18, the 10 TV shows that topped Reelgood’s latest weekly ranking are as follows:
The Old Man (FX/Hulu)
The Perfect Couple (Netflix)
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
Kaos (Netflix)
Slow Horses (Apple TV+)
Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)
Shogun (FX/Hulu)
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)
English Teacher (FX/Hulu)
The Bear (FX/Hulu)
What’s great about the list above is that, for lovers of top-tier espionage drama like me, it includes not just one but two incredible shows that fit the bill.
Besides The Old Man — which comes from co-creator, executive producer, and showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg — the fourth season of Apple TV+’s fan-favorite Slow Horses has also returned the show to the Reelgood top 10 list of TV shows. Like The Old Man, it, too, is a book adaptation (of Mick Herron‘s series of Slow Horses novels). It’s a can’t-miss, though, of an entirely different sort, mostly because of how it’s not afraid to present spies as bumbling, tryhard failures. The good guys are ordinary, sloppy, and messy — the B-team, as it were, of spooks.
The Old Man, on the other hand, is a good old-fashioned, edge-of-your-seat thriller filled with killers, mercenaries, bureaucrats, and the sort of elite spies who double as shadow warriors. And when you’re done appreciating the masterful acting herein, I’d highly encourage you to pick up Perry’s novel (in addition to checking out some of the other great streaming spy dramas we also recommend).
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