Ponies Is for the Besties

"Beatrice and Twila do the things all best friends do. They split a bottle of wine and complain about their jobs. They swap recipe ideas and go shopping. They pose galaxy-brained hypotheticals to each other, like whether they'd fuck a guy they hated if it meant stopping a nuclear war. Except that's not a hypothetical, and the guy is a KGB agent they encounter while investigating the deaths of their CIA-agent husbands in 1970s Moscow."

"Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) encourages Beatrice (Emilia Clarke) to wear new lingerie to seduce the KGB agent, assuring Beatrice he'll like it because it's "red, for communism!" This is not nuanced dialogue, and Ponies is not nuanced in its worldview, nor is it a coherent spy show. It is, however, a gratifying best-friends show. The most compelling onscreen friendships present the relationship as a kind of osmosis, one in which two companions affectionately absorb each other's qualities and quirks over time."

"(Series co-creator Susanna Fogel has played in this lane before, writing Booksmart and The Spy Who Dumped Me.) Clarke and Richardson's chemistry makes Ponies work even when everything around them makes no sense. I've watched the season finale three times to try to understand the complicated series of double crosses and revealed secrets that cap off eight episodes' worth of surveillance and betrayal, and I still can't make head or tail of it. But Clarke and Richardson are undeniable."

Ponies follows Beatrice and Twila in 1976 Moscow as two CIA wives whose husbands work espionage while the women investigate their deaths, encounter a KGB agent, and navigate seduction, surveillance, and betrayal. The series foregrounds the intimate, osmotic friendship between the prim Beatrice and the reckless Twila. Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson create distinct, complementary characters whose chemistry carries the show. The tone echoes feminist screwball comedies and spy comedies, but the dialogue and worldview often lack nuance and the plot, especially the season finale of double crosses and revelations, is frequently incoherent.

Read at Vulture