The return of The Night Manager, ten years after the first season aired, was a surprise, if only because I’m not sure anyone had been desperately rooting for another batch of episodes. That first season, after all, was perfectly done, in the sense of being very good but also in the sense of being thoroughly completed.
This review spoils the entire season.
But 2026 is a time of returns and regressions: returns of leaders and conflicts, returns to issues we thought were settled. It’s also a time of escalation: in 2016, the show worried about the weapons whose very existence evokes the specter of war crimes; in 2026, the show ups the ante by giving the villain an evil-er master plan: creating a massive army of child orphans from Latin America to instill a new dictatorship for the Kings of America (aka, the returned tyrant and his son Teddy, played by Diego Calvas). Somehow, all of this is also approved by a secretive cabal within British intelligence, headed by the always-wonderful Indira Varma.
That returning tyrant, of course, is Richard Roper, who was not killed by his previous business partners, but rather worked out an arrangement to fake his death and create, as mentioned a few lines above, a literal army of kids in order to literally take over the hemisphere. (I assume Roper has very little experience with tweens, since I’m not sure they’d actually be very good at that task. They can barely handle making their own beds or having their TikTok taken away.)
Attempting to rule “the Americas” with a child army seems less like an evil plan and more like a comic book baddie’s idea of an evil plan. The only worse ideas I can think of involve Greenland.
Tom Hiddleston returns as Jonathan Pine/Andrew Birch/Matthew Ellis, acting as foil to Hugh Laurie’s Richard Roper. Both are amazing as always: Jonathan Pine is still living “half a life,” having spent nearly a decade trying to hunt down any of Roper’s underlings through his on-the-books but off-the-beaten-path work with British intelligence. Hugh Laurie plays Roper quite well: he’s the same but edgier, as you would expect of a man who creates such a silly evil plan after a few years in a pit being tortured. Which, I grant, must have been very unpleasant.
The result is a show that is watchable but not as good as the first season. It’s more spectacle, less nuance. The clothes are flashier, the stakes bigger and yet also more personal, the improbabilities more obvious. Some elements that seemed important—like Jonathan now being willing to drink alcohol for the sake of his cover—never really came to much.
Of the hours I spent watching this show, I think I spent most of them trying to pin down how or why it wasn’t living up to the first season. I’m left with a series of minor examples that may not add up to a deal-breaker for you, but which, to me, speak to a change in register that moved this from high-class spyfare to something more basic, and thus less substantial.
The best way I can think to describe my reaction to the second season is to consider the role of love and lust across the show as a whole. In the first season, Jonathan fell for Jed (Elizabeth Debicki’s character) against his better judgement; the result was a tension between choosing love for her or justice for Roper. It was impossible to get both, and the desire for love undermined the practicality of effecting justice.
In this season, there was no real love interest, only an attempt at lust as a form of manipulation. Jonathan (now as Matthew Ellis) flirts with Teddy once he realizes he’s gay; while those scenes have sexual spark, it’s impossible to forget that Jonathan is playing him, especially as it’s also very easy for feel bad for Teddy. The show seems to want us to be rooting for Jonathan to become involved with Roxana (Camila Morrone), but there’s very little passion there.
All attempts to create a frisson misfire, maybe because Roxana is constantly shifting allegiances. I understand the show wants to portray her as having her own agenda, but without more information about her interior life, she just seemed wishy-washy, willing to turn on a dime for reasons of creating plot rather than true character motivation.
The second episode, where Jonathan and Roxana attended the charity gala (which is really funding a child army, not outreach for orphans) highlighted some of those missteps. Aware that Teddy is watching them, Jonathan and Roxana maneuver around each other at the gala as the camera circles them. Jonathan sometimes stands behind Roxana, or she behind him. To be clear, they are conversing during this pas-de-deux, and not secretly: the framing is meant to provide the viewer with the desiring gaze, watching two attractive people play off one another in a luxurious setting. But all I could think while watching it was: nobody ever actually does that. If I’m talking to someone face-to-face and they suddenly stand behind me to whisper in my ear…well, it has literally never happened to me in my entire life, because I exist in a real world, where people rarely posture for cameras so obviously.
That scene, which I admit bothered me more than it should, came to stand in for my feelings about this season overall: it didn’t manage to do what it wanted to do. David Farr wrote all the episodes for both seasons, but in season two, Georgi Banks-Davies replaced Susanne Bier, who had directed all of the first season's episodes. Perhaps that was the difference, or perhaps the first season was really meant to be a one-and-done. Sometimes, you can’t go home again.
Judging this show against prior seasons may be setting the bar too high, though. When I compare it with similar fare of the last ten years, a decade which has seen a huge resurgence of serialized spy shows, The Night Manager: Part Deux is very good. It has the luxurious trappings of the previous seasons. I especially loved the aerial shots of Medellín, not to mention a certain remote country house in what I think are the French Alps.
The last episode was also rather fascinating. I loved the call back to “watch the cups” from the first season; Roper always has another card up his sleeve. The fate of some characters was a tragedy, although I’m holding out a lowkey hope that a corollary to Josie’s Law may apply. The cliffhanger ending, left up for grabs Jonathan’s fate—not to mention any hint of a backup plan—and, I assume, for the possibility of a third season.
But if the plotting and mood for most of the episodes didn’t work for me, the cliffhanger ending and sudden twists made it even less satisfying. I was already wanting more throughout the season, I was left wanting even more by the end.
Does that mean this show is bad now? Not at all. It means the first season was so good that I’m not sure a second season could ever reach that level.
It was pleasant to watch, even if it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and I’ll definitely tune in if it returns again. Hopefully we won’t have to wait another ten years. I can’t even imagine what the world will be like then.
Three out of four evil plans.
Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)
I don't think it actually wanted us to root for Pine and Roxana, that scene at the gala's them trying not be overheard or scene to be obviously plotting together. They can't stand each other and it doesn't go anywhere. It's a misdirect but it doesn't work on its own and there's a lot of it for something that seems to be there only to contrast with Pine and Teddy. Those two have a lot more going on but as you say the manipulation angle is impossible to ignore even later on when we're probably meant to. Once the possibility of it all being a lie is on the board it can never be removed from play. It wasn't an issue with Jed because she was an outsider to S1's plot and didn't know anything so Pine couldn't have much ulterior motive (going after Roper's girlfriend causes Pine problems rather than helping him) but when we know he and Teddy have started out trying to seduce each other into spilling secrets the switch to real feelings is hard to pull off and that we're even talking about it here shows that it didn't quite work.
ReplyDeleteI hope S3 doesn't take too long to make, it felt unsatisfting to end S2 on a cliffhanger that kills off or gets rid of most of the characters.