• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 5 hours ago

In the new Peacock drama “Ponies,” the acronym PONIs is positioned as a term used for Persons of No Interest for rivals on either side of the old Cold War.

In this series based in Moscow in 1977, the most conspicuous PONIs are the wives of U.S. Embassy personnel.

Serving mainly as secretaries within the Embassy walls, the women are considered to be non-combatant, irrelevant members of the American community and therefore of no interest to the KGB.

But their husbands are a different story, since at least some of them are CIA operatives masquerading as run-of-the-mill embassy bureaucrats.

The KGB agents who tail them at all hours know all about them, and vice versa. And so, a game of cat-and-mouse plays out on the streets of Moscow 24 hours a day.

In the show, which starts streaming Thursday on Peacock, the game turns deadly when two CIA agents are killed in the crash of a small plane.

Understandably, there is much more to this story about how and why they died, but the intelligence apparatus within the Embassy is not sharing the details with the agents’ widows.

They are the ponies of the title -- persons of no interest -- but who gain an interest in wanting to find out what happened to their husbands.

The two are played by Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson -- one (Clarke) is a happily married Russian-speaking, college-educated widow and the other is a former wild child from the other side of the tracks who hates Moscow and had little love for her husband at the time that he died.

Episode One, which the TV Blog previewed on Tuesday, had a great deal of spy-movie suspense and action, such as a car chase through the streets of Moscow complete with gun play.

But aspects of “Ponies” seemed implausible or just a tad sloppy. For example, in an early scene in which two operatives are walking outdoors in December, one remarks that it is the coldest day in Moscow all winter.

And yet, we barely see the visible breath one would expect to see on such a frigid day, and at least one of them has no hat or scarf, nor has he bothered to button up his overcoat.

Even more implausible is the chain of events from which the two widows are able to maneuver themselves into strategic positions in the Embassy that will aid them in finding out the real story of their husbands’ deaths.

There is more to say on the implausibility of certain aspects of “Ponies,” but that risks violating the spoiler guidelines emanating from the Peacock publicity department.

But aside from that, Episode One of “Ponies” hummed right along at a brisk pace and ended in a cliffhanger -- which is reason enough to stick around for Episode Two and maybe more. 

All eight episodes of “Ponies” stars streaming Thursday on Peacock.