I’m not fond of the idea that escapist television has no responsibility to be plausible. However wild the world, it’s always more satisfying to inhabit if it’s internally consistent; anti-gravity boots are fine so long as they don’t stop working just when our hero needs them.
On this basis, The Night Manager, the BBC’s glossy Sunday-night Le Carré spectacular, was an abject failure. Boiled down to its essentials, the series’ climax pivoted on the relationship between Hugh Laurie’s laconic monster Richard Roper and Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine, his alleged protege in infamy and actual undercover agent. Would Roper spot that Pine had insinuated himself in a manner so implausible – meeting at a hotel, popping up at a restaurant in another country and saving his son from kidnapping six months later, then joining his nest of vipers almost on a whim and ruthlessly killing his consigliere into the bargain – that the very attempt was an insult to the concept of supervillain? Or would he switch off his suspicious faculties just when he came across the task for which he needed them most?
As the final episode got under way, it was in the balance; when it became clear that Roper had, in fact, fallen for it, our affection for the series seemed bound to shrivel under the salt of disappointment. In a show full of inconsequential impossibilities, this was the first that cut to the heart of the plot, and it seemed fatal. A budget-bustingly grand epic of subterfuge and deceit had been supplanted by A Bit of Spy and Laurie. And then, weirdly enough, I found that I still loved it.
Partly, this is because the series’ lorry-levelling denouement was a con of such delicious tidiness, granting us a moment of realisation that dawned just before it did for Roper, and tying up all the loose ends in one highly explosive bow. Partly it was the endless sex and glamour, the dumb patriotic tingle that comes whenever a British drama imports American production values and makes the most of them. And partly it was a set of superb performances, particularly from Hugh Laurie, who decided that his character’s evil would be most compellingly presented as a kind of antic, seductive wheeze, a game that anyone with the nerve might play, the looseness of his screws only becoming fully apparent in snatches.
Thinking back on it, though, I’m surprised to find that it’s something quieter and smarter that persists: the tenuousness of Pine’s grip on moral clarity, and the constant sense that his charm may be a mask for a void every bit as deep as Roper’s own. “There’s half a psychopath in there,” Olivia Colman’s underused recruiter Angela Burr tells him. “There’s not a scrap of you that won’t be used.” “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight,” his ill-fated lover Samira (Aure Atika) says at the very start. And, as it turns out, she was on to something.
As it unfolded, Pine seemed to try on a series of types, from lover to action hero to everyman. None of them quite proving satisfying, he flirted ever more obviously with Roper’s own concept of what it means to be alive: becoming a man, Roper told him, “is realising that it’s all rotten”, but “realising how to celebrate that rottenness – now that’s freedom”. How our hero longed for that freedom. In among all the explosions and writhing torsos, it was easy to miss it. But in Pine’s precarious goodness, and the chilling sense that he has picked his side almost by chance, The Night Manager smuggled in a scary, lingering argument about how arbitrary the choices that we present as moral can be. That, at least, I could believe in.
