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The Night Manager, ★★★★
The second season of The Night Manager arrives almost 10 years after the first. But despite that exorbitantly long gestation, the storyline feels like it might have been ripped straight from the headlines of recent weeks.
A secret plot to topple the government of a South American country, to instigate regime change, and pave the way for outside players to tap the abundant resources of the place? Hello, 2026.
Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is on the trail of an arms deal in Colombia in season two of The Night Manager.Credit: Prime
It’s not Venezuela here, it’s Colombia, and the agents of chaos are English rather than American, but otherwise, the elements of this fiction could hardly be more pertinent to the facts of the present moment.
In a prelude set four years after the end of the first season, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and British intelligence agent Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) are in Syria, to view the corpse of illegal arms dealer Dickie Roper (Hugh Laurie). Their nemesis has been executed by his captors over the small matter of an unpaid $300 million debt (though the money was, in fact, spirited away by Pine).
Flash forward to the present day, and Pine is back where we first met him, once again working the night shift – only now he’s traded the concierge desk for a surveillance gig with the secret service.
Olivia Colman as Angela Burr in The Night Manager.Credit: Prime
As it happens, much of the best intel comes via the security cameras at London’s top hotels. And when he spies one of Roper’s former henchmen in a Mayfair gambling den, Pine is soon dragged back into the world of clandestine arms deals, dirty money and shadowy connections between Britain’s establishment and the forces of foreign destabilisation.
The original series was based on a novel by John le Carré; this one is merely “inspired by”. But it really does honour the master’s trademark concerns with morality and class and the vexed matter of Englishness, and his rather bleak worldview.
Deceit and betrayal are the currency of his characters, but though he trades in the same economy, Pine is that rarest of creatures, a genuinely good man. Temptation awaits him at every turn, as does mortal danger. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always moral sophistry. Somehow, he remains impervious to it all.
In one of the most powerful scenes here, Pine is offered a piece of the action. Your father’s values are dead, he is told; come join the party, take your $50 million cut, and be on the side of the gods, reaping the rewards of the chaos we have sown. It’s Trump and Musk wooing their acolytes. It’s Harry Lime (Orson Welles) talking about “ants” in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s masterful 1949 noir thriller (written by Graham Greene, whose concerns are echoed by le Carré). It’s Christ being taunted and tested and tempted by Satan in the desert.
Pine finds a complicated arrangement with Roxana Bolanos (Camila Morrone) and Tedy Dos Santos (Diego Calva). Credit: Prime
Not everything in this season works. There are times when it strains at credulity, when it seems Pine is being recast in the mould of his MGM stablemate James Bond, and when the tangled motivations of the Colombian characters Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), a sort of neo-Roper, and his friend Roxana Bolanos (Camila Morrone) become tangled beyond comprehension.
Stick with it, though. The ending is so good – and so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of le Carré Carre – that all will be forgiven, even as the world itself is damned.
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