'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. 

Adapted by David Farr and directed by Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (The Perfect Couple, Bird Box), The Night Manager applies a modern coat of paint to the 1993 text – the series is bookended with episodes set in Arab Spring-era Egypt, smartphones, and other digital tech are central to both Pine’s espionage and Roper’s financial tyranny. The frantic snapshots of London we see throughout the series, where the pregnant intelligence officer Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) is subject to bureaucratic frustrations, have a distinctly contemporary, post-recession cynicism.

The Night Manager goes down smooth, perhaps too smooth for the ugly politics the story delves into. With its dazzling locales – Switzerland! Majorca! Istanbul! – and reliance on the chemistry between Pine and Roper’s girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debecki), two people under Roper’s thumb, The Night Manager doesn’t work hard enough to avoid the digestible thrills of Daniel Craig-era James Bond. Pine is spurred to take down Roper after he inadvertently gets a Cairo mistress, Sophie (Aure Aitka), killed by Roper’s crew, which means his emotions are far closer to the surface than your average agent. Hiddleston ably toes the line between slick deceit and out-of-his-depth anxiety, but he’s less prepared for the extended spells of psychological frailty the story should be generating.

This absence is less of a Hiddleston problem, more of a scripting one. Too much of The Night Manager concerns itself with plot, with Roper’s protective network setting up the next roadblock or Pine evading discovery with little formal support back home. When the victims of Western profiteering or factional armament in the Middle East are included, they seem cursory: a keenly-felt backstory for noble, white spies, or a brief, symbolic stand-in for actual drama that fuels Pine’s appetite for vengeance. 

Television doesn’t need to be didactic about the obvious cost of international war – there are myriad ways to dramatize the colonial narcissism of modern-day capitalists – but the absence of authentic non-white humanity definitely doesn’t feel like an intentional, curated vacuum that shows us the space constructed between the warmongers and civilians. Instead, the series – which is only permitted a few moments to depart stylistically from the naturalistic standard of contemporary BBC drama – limits the warmth and sensitivity of its few guiltless MENA characters. Cairo chef Youssuf (Amir El-Masry) turns up only when the plot demands him to, and Atika’s minutes of screentime are far less consequential than her brutal murder.

The black heart of The Night Manager is Laurie’s turn as Roper – a stern, short-tempered, somewhat affable middle-aged Englishman who is casually one of the most evil men on the planet. Laurie’s inspired characterization bounces between knowing euphemisms and direct, threatening cruelty, and it’s particularly interesting that Roper’s rich British holidaymaker persona (bolstered by the fragile merriment of wives and families in his company on the European getaways) is not a mask for his abject disinterest in the sanctity of human life. These temperaments are not separate entities, relying on a casualness and arrogance that preys upon Jonathan and Jed’s vulnerabilities.

Laurie underplays Roper when he needs to, which makes moments of severity all the more uncomfortable. Flanked by some equally dislikable disciples played by Alistair Petrie (Sex Education) and Tom Hollander (The White Lotus), Roper’s circle succeeds in feeling impenetrable – even though Hollander’s distrust of Pine is handled too bluntly to stay consistently compelling.

In terms of formal and dramatic complexity, the crowd-pleasing chills of The Night Manager were surpassed by 2018’s The Little Drummer Girl. The period spy thriller features another young civilian appropriated by intelligence forces (a favorite archetype of le Carré’s), but this time, it is a young woman (Florence Pugh) forced to catch a Palestinian Liberation Organization bomber by a Mossad spymaster (Michael Shannon). 

Directed by Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, The Little Drummer Girl is rich with historical friction and contradictions – it’s no surprise it wasn’t as immediately successful as its le Carré-on-TV predecessor. Revisited nine years on, the confidence of The Night Manager’s web of suspense and intrigue too often slips into an unwelcome self-assurance.

The Night Manager Season 1 is streaming on Amazon's Prime Video, Season 2 is expected out in 2025.