The Night Manager Season 2 Is Too Slow a Burn—But Incandescent Once It Finally Ignites

The Night Manager was never the most tightly plotted or politically profound spy thriller. It didn’t even turn out to be the best John le Carré adaptation to air on AMC in the 2010s. (That was Park Chan-wook’s The Little Drummer Girl.) What it really had going for it, in case you’ve forgotten in the decade since it debuted as a miniseries, was an ideal cast playing multilayered characters in a glamorous, globe-traversing epic directed by the accomplished filmmaker Susanne Bier, who won an Emmy for the achievement. Tom Hiddleston starred as a dashing military vet turned hotel night manager recruited by British intelligence to infiltrate the inner circle of Hugh Laurie’s posh, psychopathic arms dealer. Rounding out the ensemble were Olivia Colman, Elizabeth Debicki, and Tobias Menzies—all before portraying royals on The Crown, and Colman before her Oscar-winning lead role in The Favourite—as well as Tom Hollander, one of the English-speaking world’s foremost portrayers of the diminutive yet diabolical.

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Because everything old is IP again, and even though the six-episode first season had a pretty definitive ending, Prime Video has teamed up with original co-producer the BBC on an extremely belated sequel. (It’s another sign of the post-streaming-revolution times that AMC no longer seems like a platform that could support a project of this scale and star power.) While creator David Farr returns as screenwriter, Bier’s cinematic flash and sparkle are toned down by Season 2 director Georgi Banks-Davies (I Hate Suzie, Kaos). With the exception of Hiddleston, the standout actors from Season 1 are either absent or relegated to smaller roles. Perhaps most telling is Amazon’s awkward release schedule: the first three episodes come out on Jan. 11, with the final three dropping one at a time on subsequent Sundays. It makes some sense once you realize that it takes half the season for the show to heat up. That’s too long, for sure. But when it finally starts cooking, this new espionage caper is just as delectable as its predecessor.

Unlike some TV hits that have been following the same characters since 2016, The Night Manager prudently acknowledges that its returning cast is now a full decade older. A short introductory sequence has Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine meeting his stalwart partner, Angela Burr (Colman), in Syria four years after the events of Season 1 to identify the body of the villain they brought down, Laurie’s Richard Roper. (If you should, quite understandably, need your memory jogged regarding the details of Roper’s downfall, read this.) With that loose end knotted, we jump to present-day London, where Pine has a cat, a neighbor who’d like to be his girlfriend, a new alias (Alex Goodwin, not that he keeps it for long), and a desk job running an afterhours MI6 surveillance unit called the Night Owls. Despite his flair for undercover field work, he professes to have no interest in doing more of it. In fact, he seems to have no real purpose or identity at all these days, a problem on which the show gratuitously lingers, giving the people around him be-careful-what-you-wish-for lines like: “Tell me who you really are.”

Pine emerges from his funk when a routine Night Owls operation turns up a man he recognizes as one of Roper’s old henchmen. Suddenly, with the help of his ragtag team (shout out Slow Horses), he’s an international man of mystery again. The action eventually moves to Medellín, with Pine on the trail of a smooth young Colombian mogul, Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), whose combination of philanthropic ties and unsavory connections sound a bit too familiar. 

In place of Debicki’s haunted Jed, who was Roper’s girlfriend-slash-captive and Pine’s love interest, Season 2’s combination of femme fatale and Bond girl is Roxana Bolaños, a gorgeous businesswoman played by Camila Morrone. As with Jed, Pine has to trust Roxana despite his inability to be sure where her loyalty truly lies, and she needs his help, too. Many scenes in which the photogenic pair pretend to hook up while actually plotting and squabbling (“What if you’re playing me?” “What if you’re playing me?”) ensue. Theoretically, this is part of the fun of a spy romp in the James Bond mold, but it happens before viewers have much context for Roxana as a character and has the effect of prolonging the season’s slow first half.

If Roxana takes too long to step out of Jed’s shadow, which she does to great effect thanks to Morrone’s sharp performance, then Teddy is simply no substitute for Roper. That’s no knock on Calva, who does as good a job with the role as anyone could have. But Teddy’s not a championship yapper the way Roper was, spouting vile ruling-class claptrap that made him a frighteningly eloquent mouthpiece for old-school British imperialism of the most violent and nihilistic variety. And there’s only one Laurie, who elevates hauteur to high art. His character and Hiddleston’s were so well matched: two self-possessed chameleons, the former driven to enrich himself at any moral cost and the latter almost suicidally committed to stopping him. In its early episodes, Season 2 just doesn’t seem to be about anything in the way that Season 1 was about bad Western actors profiteering off the Arab Spring and the UK’s diminished role in world affairs. Nor does it get us invested enough in related plots involving Pine’s new colleagues, ably portrayed by Indira Varma, Hayley Squires, and Paul Chahidi.

But everything clicks into place after a revelation at the end of Episode 3, which really could’ve been Episode 2, if not the premiere. (Back when people paid attention to broadcast networks, the events of the first three episodes might’ve comprised a two-hour Television Event.) It doesn’t even matter that the twist is easy to see coming. Teddy gains depth, and his relationship with Pine complexity. Roxana becomes her own, thrillingly unpredictable person. Angela finally steps off the sidelines (though we still don’t see as much of Colman as I would’ve liked). Pine is once again a dynamic hero, relying on skillful manipulation more than brute force. And Farr’s shift in focus from illegal weapons dealing in the Middle East to more larger-scale interventions in Latin America feels gut-clenchingly timely. The season might be too relevant for some viewers to enjoy.

For those who can stand to be reminded of current events, the unbalanced season mostly compensates, in the final accounting, for the time it wastes up front. Watch the first half while you’re folding laundry or cooking dinner or trading texts with a devastatingly attractive person who will prove to be either your savior or your ruin. After that, though? Put your phone away.