'The Night Manager' Season 1 Still Goes Down Smooth

John le Carré's status as a (spy)master of espionage fiction has yet to be seriously challenged, not least because his 60-year writing career spanned one of the most eventful periods of international relations in human history – from the dawn of the '60s to the equally fractured era of late-stage capitalism. His novel The Night Manager, wherein a Cairo hotel employee infiltrates an arms dealer’s inner circle, was his first published after the end of the Cold War – a significant milestone for an author whose most famous novels were inextricable from the self-mythology and internal frustrations of a nation swiping at the Iron Curtain.

When the BBC’s The Night Manager adaptation aired in early 2016, the broadcaster had crossed a similarly definitive threshold. The latest golden age of television had gone streaming mad, and in the few years before subscription saturation, the BBC premiered splashy, event television with certified A-list talent alongside sterling smaller-scale dramedies that demanded their own spotlights. In 2016, The Night Manager not only sat alongside tentpoles like War & Peace, The Hollow Crown Season 2, and later David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II (more Planet, more Earth), but also domestic success stories like Motherland, The A Word, and the star-making Fleabag.

Starring a post-House Hugh Laurie as the menacing magnate Richard Roper and a post-Loki (but pre-Loki) Tom Hiddleston as the compassionate spy Jonathan Pine, the sun-drenched and sizzling tension of The Night Manager feels like a departure from the deliberately miserable le Carré adaptations that starred Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, and Gary Oldman.