Ten years is a long time. The specific stretch of 10 years between 2016 and now, particularly so. But that is how much time has elapsed between the first and second seasons of the megahit TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston as the inscrutable hotelier–turned–intelligence agent Jonathan Pine and Hugh Laurie as his foil, the chillingly evil arms dealer Richard Roper.
The first season, which follows Pine as he infiltrates Roper’s inner circle to prevent him from illegally shipping weapons in the Middle East, went gangbusters when it debuted on BBC One. It had a reported budget of £20 million (approximately $29 million), then unheard of for the BBC, and picked up 36 award nominations, including Golden Globes each for Hiddleston, Laurie, and Olivia Colman, who played the hard-boiled, heavily pregnant MI6 handler for Pine. It brought le Carré back to the small screen for the first time in a long while, following the success of recent cinematic adaptations of his work like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) and A Most Wanted Man (2014), and the public and critics alike gushed over it. “This is what we want Auntie to be for,” the critic A. A. Gill wrote in the Sunday Times, referring to the BBC by one of its pet names. “It reminds us that once we had the best TV in the world.”
Part of the show’s success was that it upped the pace of le Carré’s work for modern audiences. The author’s novels are brilliantly complex and notoriously ponderous, not immediately well-suited for the era of streaming shows muscling each other for viewers’ attention. But The Night Manager retained something of that slowness in the character of Pine, who is not a protagonist who comes out all guns blazing, but someone whose core takes time to reveal itself, and threw in enough luxurious locations and perfectly crisp shirts to give the whole production a prestige feel. Part of its acclaim was also that it felt complete. The six-episode series was a story, well told, from the beginning through to an obvious end. It was sleek, poised, and serious in tone, with nothing so vulgar as a shoddy set of rushed new seasons off the back of its success to sully its air of refinement.
Until now. At first, le Carré himself was against a sequel, but he changed his mind shortly before he died in 2020. And so now, a full decade after its first season, we have a second season of The Night Manager, with an entirely new Pine story not based on le Carré’s novels, which begins streaming with three episodes on Prime Video today.
Ten years have also passed in the world of The Night Manager. Pine, a decade on from his climactic standoff with Roper, is drawn into another shady underworld, this time in Colombia, to investigate a second charming and dangerous gun runner. But something has shifted in the 10 years that have passed in our world, and in the world of spy dramas. TV-spy mania seems to come in waves. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, there were wonderful BBC adaptations of le Carré’s George Smiley books (which, if you’ve never had the pleasure, I recommend you seek out), and then spies slipped off our screens for the most part until Fox’s 24 in 2001 and the BBC’s Spooks in 2002. Then another break, and after FX’s The Americans won critical acclaim with its Cold War KGB agents narrative, Season 1 of The Night Manager triggered a new golden age for a different kind of espionage thriller. The series proved that spy dramas on television could be cinematic in scope, lavish in production, and air out the Cold War mustiness of old mackintoshes and rainy alleyways. They could be glamorous and aspirational in their portrayals of espionage, like Bond, but still take the stakes of spy work seriously. It was followed by The Little Drummer Girl in 2018, another lush le Carré miniseries on the BBC with an all-star cast including Alexander Skarsgård, Florence Pugh, and Michael Shannon, and paved the way for shows like Killing Eve.
But in the intervening decade, another, very different sort of spy show has shot to international acclaim: Apple TV’s Slow Horses. Adapted from Mick Herron’s novels, Slow Horses charts the lives of MI5’s reject agents, relegated to only the most idiot-proof work in a building far away from the agency’s headquarters. Unlike in The Night Manager, or something like Jack Ryan, the spies of Slow Horses don’t make the occasional mistake that can be rectified by derring-do and 4D-espionage chess. Their failures are consistent. Spies are not otherworldly, invisible elite agents flitting between far-flung locations; they’re human beings with jobs and mortgages and humdrum character failings. The Day of the Jackal, Eddie Redmayne’s spy thriller series that came out amid building Slow Horses fervor, was good, but it hasn’t inspired the same amount of passion and fandom, perhaps in part because a millionaire world-class sniper and disguise artist who lives in a palatial house in Cadiz simply isn’t as loveable or relatable as the ragtag bunch of losers who make up Slough House, which is portrayed as a sort of carcinogenic growth on the limb of the civil service.
This second Night Manager season arrives at a moment when spy dramas have moved on, and in a grubbier, more down-to-earth direction than the one the first season ushered in. There’s something interesting in the fact that Slow Horses does, in some ways, more resemble le Carré than The Night Manager does. George Smiley was no Bond, after all. “Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London’s meek who do not inherit the earth,” as he is described in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The first televisual installment of The Night Manager skewed more Bond: ice-cold cocktails, the protagonist sleeping with the villain’s girlfriend, fabulous hotels. Slow Horses, with all its lingering odor of decay and intelligence-operative incompetence, has been such a huge hit that the pressure was always going to be on this new season of The Night Manager to prove that straight-faced, glamorous spy drama can still appeal.
Compared to Jackson Lamb’s foul zingers and River Cartwright’s dashing but scrappier spy hero, Pine’s hotelier’s ability to assume blandness in the service of his work might look a bit, well, wooden. Suave unknowability is no longer the quality du jour. But The Night Manager team have been wise not to try to row back either the somber tone or the lavishness that made the first season a hit. Pine does not, thank God, spend more than half an episode working from a windowless MI6 basement, nor burp. Without giving too much away, viewers of this new season will find the formula pretty much unchanged from Season 1. A handsome and troubled rogue agent versus the rich and morally bankrupt was good then, and it’s good now. If it ain’t broke …
What will come next in the world of spy dramas will probably fork off in two directions: high and low spy culture. There will, I think, prove to be an appetite for one-liners and bureaucracy, and also for opulence and pressed linens. Slow Horses and The Night Manager have been renewed for at least one further season apiece. I’ll be seated for both.
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