It is the rare literary adaptation that replicates not only an author’s characters but the psychological experience of reading him. Such is the achievement of The Night Manager, the second season of which is now streaming on Prime Video after a 10-year hiatus. Watching the 12-episode series, one is alternately charmed, compelled, frustrated, and hopelessly confused. Why’d he do that? How’d they find him there? As with the show, so with John le Carré’s novels. If one isn’t at least slightly perplexed most of the time, one isn’t paying enough attention.
The Night Manager tells the story of Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a British soldier-turned-hotel clerk thrust into a game of global intrigue. In the first season, set largely in Egypt and Majorca, Pine embedded himself in the coterie of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), an international arms dealer of suave malevolence. The latest episodes transplant Pine to Colombia, where awaits a plot so circuitous that many viewers will simply throw up their hands and enjoy the scenery.
The basic outline is this: Set up by his Foreign Office handlers in a surveillance unit, Pine happens upon talk that “Richard Roper’s true disciple” is operating in sunny Cartagena. Unable to help himself, Pine ditches his desk job and sets out for the Caribbean coast, determined once again to talk his way into a criminal’s inner circle. His target this time is Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), a man whose villainy extends far beyond running guns. A Colombian Supreme Court justice, an electromagnetic pulse bomb, even regime change: Only our hero can stop the geopolitical disaster that Dos Santos threatens to unleash.
Were The Night Manager’s formula any less winning, one might object to the shamelessness with which it has been recycled. As the first season did, the show’s new episodes feature a protagonist so smooth that his entrée into the underworld is the work of minutes. Here, a single set of clay-court tennis does the trick. Like before, Pine’s task is made easier by his adversary’s disloyal girlfriend (Camila Morrone, filling in for the first season’s Elizabeth Debicki). Most pointedly, both seasons place a traitor in the ranks of MI6, the security service frequently at odds with Pine’s International Enforcement Agency (Olivia Colman returns to play the IEA’s no-nonsense head). Le Carré didn’t invent these elements — he merely perfected them. At its best, The Night Manager makes James Bond look like a garish cartoon.
It is disappointing, then, to have to report that the show’s new season is a mere shadow of its first. All the stylishness remains, but the sense of play has mostly vanished. One is tempted, surveying the terrain, to blame the writers’ room, if only to protest a clunking bisexuality subplot featuring a visibly squeamish Hiddleston. The truth, however, is that The Night Manager’s greatest asset has always been its casting rather than its scripts. Whereas the first season employed an almost miraculous assemblage of talent, the second’s call sheet is comparatively second-rate.
The results of this step-down are apparent in nearly every new scene. Attempting to follow Debicki, former runway model Morrone summons irritation but none of the half-ironic poutiness that made her forerunner so sexy. Droll, campy Tom Hollander has given way to deputies of such anonymity that even their mothers must struggle to keep them straight. As for Laurie, he is quite simply irreplaceable, an actor so accomplished that I can’t spot his tricks despite having watched all 177 episodes of House M.D. I will not let on whether Roper makes an appearance this season after the seeming discovery of his corpse. Suffice it to say, we feel Laurie’s absence keenly when he is not onscreen.
Yet there is another reason, too, why The Night Manager’s new run struggles to live up to expectations. In 2016, it was still possible to be surprised by the machinations of the deep state, never mind a century of evidence to the contrary. Ten years later, the notion that a Western government might protect Dos Santos instead of arresting him is old hat. What ought to be a screen-shattering “reveal” is just one more notch on the tally. One wonders, in fact, whether the show’s characters are perhaps too sure of their assorted schemes, a concern that readers of le Carré’s best novels may find difficult to credit. Recall, for instance, Smiley’s diffidence at the end of the Karla trilogy: “‘George, you won,’ said Guillam. … ‘Did I?’ said Smiley. ‘Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.’” Nothing of the kind plays out in The Night Manager, which gives us figures of such unyielding self-confidence that one might thrill to hear them debating on an Oxford Student Union stage.
Is this a complaint about the TV series or the book? Both, I suppose, though let the record show that the second season outpaces both its predecessor and le Carré’s novel for sheer ideological doggedness. By the fifth episode, we have mostly put together the season’s convoluted plot and are ready for some fireworks. When they come, in a long-awaited showdown between Pine and his enemy, the two men trade political theories rather than blows. “See the chaos and grab your chance.” “Conscience is what makes us human.” Give me, and everyone else watching, a break.
Adrift in this sea of certitude is Hiddleston, an otherwise marvelous lead who, one suspects, would far rather be tying a Windsor knot or perfecting his serve. My advice to him and the rest of the team: Ditch the sincerity and turn the fun back up to “10.” Beautiful Monte Carlo, anyone?
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
