Apple TV isn't waiting to see how season six lands before locking in season eight of Slow Horses. Deadline reported the renewal on Monday, a day before the show's sixth season even premieres, and Jay Hunt, the platform's creative director for international, called it a bet on a cast she says still "charms audiences all around the world."

That's a lot of confidence for a show that hasn't aired a single new episode of its current run yet. Season six lands Wednesday, September 16, though anyone who's watched the last few seasons knows better than to wait up. Apple has a habit of dropping episodes the night before the official date, and multiple outlets, including Decider, expect episode one to hit around 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Here's the shape of the season. Gary Oldman returns as Jackson Lamb, and this time his Slough House misfits are getting picked off one by one. Jack Lowden's River Cartwright has his own mess to deal with too, because his estranged mercenary father Frank Harkness, played by Hugo Weaving, has resurfaced in London with what TheWrap describes as nefarious intentions. Two assassins, played by Kyle Soller and MyAnna Buring, are doing the hunting.

Kristin Scott Thomas, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffion Edwards and Tom Brooke are all back, and Olivia Cooke returns as Sid Baker after a long absence from the show. New faces this season include Lenny Rush, Lucian Msamati and Harry Lloyd.

The season adapts two Mick Herron books at once, Joe Country and Slough House, the first time the show has stitched two novels into a single run. Six episodes, one a week, wrapping October 21.

What comes after is already sketched out. Season seven, already greenlit last year around the time season five premiered, will draw from Herron's Bad Actors. Season eight, per Deadline's report, moves to the ninth Slough House novel, Clown Town, and promises what Apple is billing as the biggest showdown yet between Lamb and Kristin Scott Thomas's Diana Taverner. The official line from Apple describes a botched blackmail attempt against MI5 that puts Taverner on the offensive, leaving Lamb to unravel what's called one of the service's darkest secrets.

There's a changeover happening off screen too. TheWrap notes this is the first season made without longtime showrunner and creator Will Smith, which makes season six something of a test, not of whether audiences still like these characters, but of whether the machine behind them holds up without the person who built it. Early word from Apple suggests they're not worried. The Emmy for Outstanding Directing the show picked up this year suggests the voters weren't either.

Episode one streams this week. Two more seasons are already locked in behind it. What's not locked in yet is whether a show running on autopilot from its creator can keep the same nerve it had when he was still steering it.