Netflix's 'The Night Agent' Gets Bad News Amid Season 4 Questions

Netflix hit show The Night Agent debuted in March 2023 and immediately found success for the streaming platform with 20.6 million views in its first week. After a nearly two-year hiatus, the show received a steep drop in viewership with only 13.5 million views in its first week - a 32% drop.

SPOILERS AHEAD:

Season 3 of the show released earlier this month and explores the dark side of finance and its ties to terrorism and political corruption at the highest level which reaches the White House.

Season 3 confirms new U.S. President Richard Hagan (Ward Horton) is in the pocket of shady intelligence broker Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum) as was hinted at in the end of Season 2, but there's some nuance to the situation.

Netflix Announces Viewership for Season 3

With Season 3 debuting this month, Netflix officially announced the viewership numbers and it's not great news.

"Seasoned night owl and undercover operative Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is back in  Season 3 of The Night Agent, which took No. 2 on the English TV list with 8.4 million views," the streaming platform revealed.

That figure represents another steep drop in viewership from Season 2 as questions about Season 4 continue.

Will 'The Night Agent' Return for Season 4?

Netflix has not officially picked up the show for a fourth season, however, the streaming platform did "quietly" pick up a writers room according to producer Shawn Ryan. He revealed the writers were already working on a new script and pointed to a tax credit received by the show to move from New York to Los Angeles.

According to Deadline, the $31.6 million tax credit comes with a six-month window to start production on a fourth season.

“To Netflix’s credit, they want to make sure that the creative side of things is always buttoned up before committing that amount of money,” Ryan said at the time. “We’re in the story-breaking, script-writing phase, and my guess is, sometime in the next [few weeks, up to a month], they’ll make a decision about officially greenlighting Season 4, and if and when they do, we’ll be ready to go with the scripts so that there’s not that much time between Season 3 and Season 4. I think Netflix cares about their viewers and is looking for ways to minimize the time between the seasons of their most successful shows.”

While Ryan says the world in Season 4 is a secret, “there’s a world that we’re in, it’s a world that exists in Los Angeles, which is the creative reason why we moved the show to Los Angeles, because it’s a world that is present in Los Angeles, it’s not present in New York for the most part," he said after receiving the tax credit.

Which Characters Will Return for Season 4?

When asked if most of the familiar characters will return, Ryan initially said "yes" but then turned coy as work on the fourth season is still underway.

“The answer is yes, but I don’t want to share any of that yet because it could always change,” Ryan told Deadline. “One thing we’ve discovered in the first three seasons of making this show, it’s a very serialized show, a lot of pieces that hold together. One thing we’ve realized is that we do our best work when we get through the season and then allow ourselves time to go back and to change things in the earlier episodes. Just because we finished writing in episode three doesn’t mean that that’s locked forever in crystal. We go back and we change a lot of things because we discover things along the way. So I have an idea of which characters would return, but certainly, until there’s actually an official pickup, there’s no reason to go into it. And I want to get further into the creative of the season to make sure that what we start with is what we want to finish with.”

Related: Netflix Quietly Cancels New Show After Just 1 Season