Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson in 'Ponies.' Peacock Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Throughout much of Ponies, Peacock's new Moscow-set spy thriller, the Cold War seems to be in a dead heat. The KGB watches the CIA, who watches the KGB watch them. The CIA hides bugs and cameras wherever they can, so the KGB does the same in turn. Everyone is trying to smoke out moles, or plant some of their own. On both ends, it takes an awful lot of high-wire activity to net no meaningful gains at all. The same could be said, alas, for the show itself. Armed with swinging '70s style and enough hairpin turns to throw even the most seasoned driver, Ponies, starring Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson, has moments of dazzle. But with neither enough depth to leave a lasting impression nor enough entertainment to make up for that, the drama winds up little more than a forgettable distraction. Related Stories Movies Édgar Ramírez on Immigrants, Grief and Producing His First Feature Film: "I Become Like a Rabid Dog" Movies Netflix Unveils Full Cast for 'The Twits' Movie, Original Songs by David Byrne and Hayley Williams Ponies The Bottom Line Tries hard but falls short. Airdate: Thursday, Jan. 15 (Peacock)Cast: Emilia Clarke, Haley Lu Richardson, Adrian Lester, Artjom Gilz, Nicholas Podany, Petro Ninovskyi, Vic MichaelisCreators: David Iserson, Susanna Fogel Creators David Iserson (Mr. Robot) and Susanna Fogel (who also directs four of the eight episodes) previously worked together on the middling The Spy Who Dumped Me, and their latest outing unfolds along similar genre tropes. Straitlaced Bea (Clarke) and brash Twila (Richardson) are ordinary Americans who've come to Moscow with their CIA agent husbands. When their men are killed in a suspicious plane crash, the wives decide to become CIA operatives themselves in hopes of uncovering the truth. That they're inexperienced - and, to the horror of the CIA's very male top brass, women - is not a weakness, they figure, but a strength. The Soviets surely aren't going to look twice at a couple of PONIs, or Persons of No Interest. The pitch is good enough for Dane (Adrian Lester), the agency's outwardly cool but increasingly desperate bureau chief. After assigning them cover jobs as embassy secretaries, he pitches them headfirst into a sprawling adventure that's partly a wacky buddy comedy, partly a steely action thriller, occasionally a heavy grief drama and eventually - once Bea attracts the interest of both a dangerous KGB official (a very menacing Artjom Gilz) and a gentle electronics technician (Petro Ninovskyi) - sometimes also a high-stakes romantic drama. It would be very possible to make a diverting show by spinning all those tonal and thematic plates at once - and in fact Fogel has before, as a director and producer on HBO's deliciously dizzy The Flight Attendant. But where that series worked because its wild twists were anchored in a deep character portrait, Ponies never quite seems to know what makes Bea and Twila tick. Why they're so drawn to this work or how good they are at it seems to shift from scene to scene. How they feel about the organization they're serving or the conflict they're fighting barely comes up at all - oddly, for a show obsessed with the idea of double agents. Perhaps because the writing is imprecise, the performances are too. Richardson's innate charisma carries her for a while, but in the absence of thoughtful character development she resorts to mugging for the camera, so that Twila sometimes slips into a caricature of a brassy broad. Clarke is believable in Bea's more tender moments but less so in her tougher ones; she might be a rom-com heroine who's wandered on to the wrong set. Among the supporting cast, Lester is wonderfully grumpy and Harriet Walter, playing Bea's wise babushka, great fun. But neither character is drawn with enough dimension to make them pop off the page - much less ones like kindly CIA official Ray (Nicholas Podany) and his shrewish wife Cheryl (Vic Michaelis), where it's hard to even tell if they're meant to be laughable, likable or pitiable. "Maybe there are just too many lies and you don't know who is the man under the lies anymore," a therapist suggests to a spook, but I suspect it's Ponies that's getting so tangled up in plot twists that it's lost sight of the people meant to be driving them. Still, enough about Ponies works to make it watchable in a "something to pass the time" way. Aesthetically, it's a treat. Twila is a reliable source of fabulously offbeat, unmistakably American looks, courtesy of costume designer Anastasia Magoustas. (Those curls! Those flares!) The sets, by production designer Sara K White, look richly rendered in era-appropriate shades of mustard and teal and mahogany. The soundtrack boasts expe