The Night Manager: Season One Review

“You have to commit.” 

 I’ll start by telling you the basics of The Night Manager, even though they sound like the plot of just about any movie that isn’t pre-existing IP these days: When Jonathan Pine, the night manager at a five-star Cairo hotel, stumbles onto some terrible information about illegal chemical weapons, he gradually gets involved in taking down the wealthy arms dealer Richard Roper on behalf of a rogue unit within British intelligence.

This six-episode season, which we all thought was a limited series until a second season premiered in early 2026, transcends all of the clichés implicit in that brief recap. Sure, it’s an everyday joe (with a military background) pulled out of a boring existence to try to do good in the world. Yes, it’s luxurious wealth that we’re meant to admire and despise at the same time. Yes, it’s the little guys versus the big guys, with expected casualties along the way. 

But David Farr’s The Night Manager is one of the better spy stories I’ve seen or watched, probably because it’s based on a John Le Carré novel of the same name, but also because the six episodes allow us to spend time with these characters not just as plot-functionaries but as complicated individuals who, like all of us, bring a lot of baggage to every situation. 

When this show premiered in 2016 Tom Hiddleston was still (and perhaps still is) most well-known as Loki from all those Marvel movies, and while he doesn’t quite play against type here, because he’s still wildly charming, his performance as Pine has a subtlety that comic book franchises rarely allow. As Pine, he’s suave and smiling, even as he’s aware that his life working in hotels is, in his own words, “only living half a life.” His penchant for beautiful women, which often puts them in harms way, feels like a modern, less cartoonish riff on a James Bond trope. 

But although Hiddleston is the marquee name here—and don’t get me wrong, he’s great—my favorite performance was Hugh Laurie as Richard Roper. Roper’s a terrible human being, but he’s also charismatic and a fun conversationalist. He’s the kind of guy who remembers people’s names. He’s friendly without ever being anyone’s friends. It was a nice switch from the sort of villains who are always sly and plainly evil. 

Olivia Coleman plays Angela Burr, who might be the most nuanced character, if only because it’s rare to see a pregnant female spy just, you know, doing her job and doing it well. Her work with the International Enforcement Agency is neither MI6 nor MI5, but that means less power along with slightly less oversight. While trauma and loss motivate Hiddleston’s Pine, Angela is motivated by an ideological commitment against war crimes. I mean, who isn’t? But also, seriously: who is motivated by just goodness these days? Most characters need to have a personal trauma as their inciting event. Angela just saw bad things happening and worked harder to stop them. Olivia Coleman is, of course, amazing. 

The secondary cast all deserve shout-outs, by which I mean you'll spend a lot of time shouting out "oh, it's that guy!" I want to highlight David Harewood, who plays Joel Steadman, a good (may I say “steady”?) American trying to help Angela take down Roper. He’s been in many things, but readers of this site might recognize him from Supergirl. You’ll recognize many of the other actors, from Tom Hollander and Tobias Menzies to Elizabeth Debicki. 

Spy shows tend to come with two vibe options: gritty or glossy. This is one of the glossy shows: Cairo, the Swiss Alps, and Mallorca all have starring roles, with nothing but the best of the mansions, elegant furniture, and beautiful vistas that, I suppose, make war crimes so appealing to some people.

The Mallorca compound.

The result is very bingeable, not because of breakneck plotting, but because I found myself getting wrapped up in the characters’ attempts to solve their various problems. Getting me to root for the good guys is easy; portraying them as nuanced individuals is harder and one of the many ways in which The Night Manager excels. 

Having said that: I tried this show back when it came out in 2016, and bounced right off it. I don’t remember any particular fault, just a general sense that it didn’t grab me. I only tried it again because I couldn’t find anything else interesting to watch, and the buzz for the second season reminded me it existed. 

I think my newfound affection for the show is tied to a recent mild fascination with the novels of the mid-twentieth-century author Graham Greene. He specializes in stories of semi-dissipated, semi-idealistic Englishmen abroad, often in colonized or decolonizing countries. Those men are never happy, and the alcohol never helps as much as they think it does. But Greene creates an interesting contrast: his Englishmen like living in foreign countries because they all know, to varying degrees, that they do not belong there. They choose that alienation, not because it is pleasant, but because it is alienation caused by location, rather than the subtle, pervasive alienation they find in England itself. The location is the excuse for what they would feel anywhere.

Viewed through that lens—as a post-Empire descendent of Greene’s archetype—Pine becomes the new face of alienation, one that is globalized yet deracinated, not just through the loss of his kindly father (who died in Belfast), or with his new evil daddy figure (Richard Roper, of course), or the disenchantment with neoliberal warfare (Pine served in the second Iraq war), but through the failure of useful personal and political models through which he can understand his place in the world, when the world is so flawed. 

In Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx defines paradigm, a word we all use in a slapdash manner: “The term paradigm, despite rampant overuse in marketing copy and mocked as meaningless jargon on The Simpsons, describes a specific phenomenon in social sciences: the macro-values that set the logic of our choices and aesthetics. When a new paradigm emerges, the previous established styles lose all their values” (123). 

This show, which aired in 2016 but was filmed in 2015, winds up being a perfect example not of a paradigm shift, but the brief liminal space in which that shift between one paradigm and another takes place. Pine didn’t like the world he lived in, but he can’t quite imagine what comes next. That’s why he’s living “half a life,” why he likes hotel work, itself inherently liminal, and why he’s so comfortable easing into a false persona—without anything else to be, what else could he do? 

That makes this a show that only could have been filmed and aired when it did: before Trump, before Brexit, before everything that has happened since, but also after the death of Bin Laden, after the rise of cellphones, social media, and the lost promise of the Arab Spring. While its theme—good vs. evil—may be universal, its social relevance is, perhaps, more astute than we ever could have realized at the time. 

Four out of four Elizabeth Debicki haircuts. 

Although this review was spoiler free, the comments are open to spoilers! 

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)