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The Night Agent started life as a determined little underdog. Uncool, old-fashioned and on the wrong side of Netflix’s tendency to hype some shows while leaving others unloved, it had to fight its way into the streaming platform’s most-viewed section and critics’ best-of-2023 lists, which it did simply by being a sturdily constructed, twist-packed conspiracy thriller. Once viewers switched it on, they couldn’t switch it off.
It concerns Night Action, an awkwardly named arm of the American intelligence services that is so secret it doesn’t officially exist. When we met him, Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) was its most junior employee, answering the landline phone that rang in the White House basement when an agent needed assistance. By the end of the first season, Peter’s courage, hand-to-hand combat skills and, most of all, his unswerving, country-serving, square-jawed moral code had seen him single-handedly foil a presidential assassination plot.
Now, something has to change. Peter is a proper night agent and the show, created by Shawn Ryan – who also ran black-souled cop saga The Shield – can’t pull the same trick of sneaking up on an audience who don’t expect much because it seems so wholesome and humble. It needs to go bigger.
Or does it? At first, season two looks determined not to progress. Episode one has Peter in Bangkok and New York, tailing bad guys who have acquired a USB stick full of secret stuff and will readily shoot at anyone who tries taking it off them. When the op goes wrong because Night Action’s intel has been leaked, Peter drops off the grid, goes rogue and reunites with love interest Rose (Luciane Buchanan). She is a civilian but is also brave, quick-thinking, ethically upstanding and so on, as well as conveniently being a world-class coder who specialises in futuristic facial recognition software.
Peter and Rose hole up in his bare apartment, rented under a false name, surveilling a villain before chasing him down alleyways then unexpectedly being shot at by powerful forces unseen. It’s fine, but for as long as it sticks to the basics there’s a danger of the show’s self-imposed limitations becoming too much of a turn-off. The Night Agent refuses to be sexy – Peter and Rose’s romance is hesitant and, by modern TV standards, chaste – or funny. It’s Jason Bourne without the dark nihilism, Reacher without the dry wit, 007 without the satin-sheet romps, knowing winks or luxury travel budget. Like Peter when he’s hiding in an abandoned warehouse and the goons surrounding it toss a grenade in, it needs to think of something, and fast.
Relax: there’s a Plan B, which is that The Night Agent essentially turns into Homeland. Whereas season one was domestic in outlook and worried about turncoats in Washington, the new story has international bogeymen to deal with: the minions of a Milosevic-esque European war criminal are covertly in league with the Iranian mission to the UN, and a terror attack on US soil is the potential endgame. Such concerns probably dropped off your list of the most dreaded geo-political doomsdays a few years ago and might come across as quaint in 2025, but The Night Agent has never worried about being up with the latest trends.
While Peter, Rose and the new Only Person They Can Trust, top spook Catherine (Amanda Warren), carry on doing their thing, trying to work out what the significance of the stolen documents is and who is really buying and selling them, the story is also told from another angle. Inside the Iranian ambassador’s Manhattan mansion is a mole, Noor (Arienne Mandi), a low-ranking aide willing to betray her boss to the CIA in exchange for help bringing her family from Iran to the US, and who will face the full force of the nasty, paranoid, viciously misogynist regime if her cover is blown.
There’s nothing original about making us hold our breath as someone who isn’t cut out for spy work nevertheless attempts it under the noses of her terrifying superiors, but The Night Agent knows how to deliver that thrill. An episode where Peter and Rose infiltrate a gathering of dignitaries at the ambassador’s house is pleasingly fraught, and one built around a risky mission inside Iran successfully does the Homeland thing of mining inhospitable foreign territory for every ounce of threat.
These dynamics are different but, once it gets back up to speed, The Night Agent is the same show, endearingly unpretentious and focused purely on a narrative that has no frills, but no fat on it either. As the body count rises and the heroics required of Peter again start to seem impossible, it gets the job done.
