Finesse was the selling point of The Night Manager when it debuted in 2016. It was a class above other spy thrillers, setting itself among moneyed elites – rotten ones, but elites nonetheless – and furnishing itself with luxury locations. In Tom Hiddleston it had a lead with a reputation that signalled that the often tacky espionage genre was looking to improve itself. Based on a book by John le Carré and airing on the BBC in the dying days of the era when that carried heavyweight global cachet, its pedigree was impeccable.
A large part of the rarefied atmosphere the series created, though, was in being one and done: it swept in, won a ton of awards, then swooshed away, leaving behind a delicate waft of something impossibly exclusive. Lesser shows would have hastily cashed in with an inferior second season, but The Night Manager could not be so vulgar.
A decade later, it’s back. Whether it’s the new Amazon co-production money or the frenzy among platform bosses to make spy things that might be a bit like Slow Horses, the programme has been lured into the fray again. Hiddleston and co-star Olivia Colman are here for season two, with a third run already on its way.
The elegant Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), who began the story as an ex-soldier manning the night desk at five-star hotels before being provoked into joining MI6 when international master criminals whacked his girlfriend, is still in the secret service but no longer in the field. He suppresses the trauma he suffered in season one by working a different kind of hotel-related night shift: running an unglamorous surveillance unit that monitors the CCTV of London’s swankiest establishments, watching for behaviour that raises a terror flag.
Pine’s crew are oddballs who are part of MI6 but excluded from the main building, instead operating from faceless premises down the road. They talk warily of the bigwigs at HQ, “River House”, who have given them a nickname: the “Night Owls”. Hang on! Has The Night Manager gone fully Slow Horses? Only for half an episode: when the sight of a familiar face shocks Pine so much his complexion changes from magnolia to ivory, he’s soon turning himself into a proper spy again.
Hiddleston remains a divisive presence. He’s either a 21st-century take on a James Bond-style hero, single-handedly bringing down the billion-dollar business of a criminal mastermind without any ludicrous gadgets or retrograde chauvinism, and without being cringingly smarmy about it all. Or he’s a ridiculous attempt to bring modern sensitivity to an essentially boorish and silly genre, and is cringingly smarmy. It depends on your taste.
It doesn’t matter too much, because what elevated the original Night Manager wasn’t Hiddleston, but who he was up against. If Hugh Laurie and Tom Hollander didn’t immediately sound like obvious casting for pitiless arms dealer Dickie Roper and his psychopathic lieutenant, Corky, the way they subverted their own chummy poshness quickly convinced us that our man Pine had walked into the very heart of darkness. These are the extremely bad men who really run the world, we were willing to believe, and we’ve sent someone to fight them armed only with strong morals and crisp linen.
The new Night Manager tries to sustain that Roper bogeyman vibe, without Roper himself. The operation Pine is now infiltrating, a Colombian arms cartel, is linked to Roper, and Pine has Roper-themed flashbacks. Roper looms over all. But the big man has gone, and his replacement, Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva, who was a drug lord in Narcos: Mexico), is a much more generic antagonist. Doubtless he’ll be getting help from inside MI6 – Paul Chahidi, Hayley Squires and Indira Varma are superb as the new faces there, alongside a rehired Douglas Hodge as the upstanding if perhaps not hard-nosed enough Rex Mayhew. But, the show loses its naughty glint when Pine isn’t directly up against other members of the British upper classes. Although the drama still feels like cashmere and silk, the blade stashed in the folds isn’t so sharp.
There is something fundamentally gauche, too, about the way season two methodically tries to rebuild the dynamic of the first run. Pine suffers another tragedy, adopts another fake identity and, without being sure who he can trust back at base, pitches himself into another game of bluff with another nefarious kingpin who could suss him at any moment – potentially aided by said supervillain’s disaffected moll (Camila Morrone). None of this is to say The Night Manager is suddenly average: it still floats far above most of the competition. But it no longer feels pristine.
• The Night Manager aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now. It airs on Prime Video on 11 January.
