"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."
"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."
Cold War espionage produced widespread surveillance and paranoia with little tangible result. Ponies, a Peacock spy series, deploys familiar Cold War tropes — bugged apartments, moles, mutual surveillance — and acknowledges the era's futility through Dane Walter's observation that the world would function the same without spies. The series employs creators David Iserson and Susanna Fogel but lacks enough novelty; its twists often defy sense and its clearer moments underdeliver. The eight-episode season finds value in the chemistry between two wannabe spies, shifting tone toward fizzy buddy comedy. The story takes place in 1976, when booksmart Bea Grant and brassy Twila Hasbeck cross paths in Moscow.
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