"Slow Horses."

Two episodes into the Apple TV+ drama, the questions are, "Do I stick with this?: and "What is it, really?" Pretty good questions, actually.

One of the truisms of television and its relentless pursuit of intellectual property — books, compelling true-life stories from newspapers and magazines, etc. — is that you can’t expect the audience to have read the source material (particularly if it’s a book) and, in turn, you can’t expect the readers of that book to like what you’ve made out of it, which is often quite different (though sometimes both camps seem happy — see “Station Eleven,” among others).

When watching, the best guiding advice is the simplest — judge it on what you see, not what you’ve heard it’s supposed to be.

But the point is relevant in that “Slow Horses,” based on the novel of the same name from British writer Mick Herron (who would go on to write a series of related spy-thrillers), comes out of the gate one way (expected) and then tries another way (unexpected) and then becomes a little bit of something else (kind of predictable).

It certainly makes you wonder what you’re getting into.

Mashing itself together into a hodge-podge of ideas absolutely might work — the third episodes of six initial ones doesn’t debut until Friday — but we won’t know until we get there. And then, per usual, we might have differing opinions on the effectiveness of that journey.

“Slow Horses” is about British spies and starts with a very long action scene that makes you think it’s going to be just that kind of show — taut, compelling, dramatic. But it suddenly kicks down a gear into an exploration of the boring side of spy work, complete with burnouts and snarky jokes, meaning it’s kind of a workplace comedy — but the snarkiness is mostly grounded rather than broad and so it only periodically takes your mind off of the more serious spy business at hand. Then, into that mix comes a story we’ve all seen before — an overly cantankerous ass of a human who, if we extrapolate out the rest of the episodes, will likely have a good reason for being that way and thus be more likable and important to the overall theme.

I wouldn’t say that’s schmaltzy, but redemptive character studies do want your love and support — which is fine, unless all you want is spy craft, which is the likely reason you showed up in the first place.

I guess all of this is a long way of saying that “Slow Horses” is trying a few things on in these first two episodes (they dropped on April 1 and each successive one will drop on Fridays) and you have to ask yourself if it’s compelling enough to hang around.