I SPY A MEDIOCRE SHOW

Why Is Everyone Obsessed With Netflix’s ‘The Night Agent’?

It’s certainly a fast-paced binge, but this political thriller starring Gabriel Basso and Luciane Buchanan takes itself too seriously.

Ever read an airport novel that’s hard to put down, but also nearly impossible to retain once you do?

Sometimes books or movies operate a bit like the bus from Speed: They have to maintain a certain forward momentum or they’ll detonate, leaving behind only smoldering ash. (It’s a great paradox that Speed itself is not one of these, merely a handy metaphor for describing that mechanism in others.) On its own, that quality is fine; some entertainment is here for a good time, not for a long time. But television may be the hardest medium to sustain this kind of heedless, breakneck, page-turning pace.

Think about it: Do the best binge-watches draw you into the story with heavily character-based moral dilemmas and accompanying suspense, like Breaking Bad? Or do they just try to offer nonstop action, wannabe excitement, and international intrigue, like The Night Agent?

Obviously The Night Agent, which just launched its second season, must be that dream binge for some people; the first season was a big hit on Netflix in 2023, enough to secure a new 10-episode second season with a third already ordered.

The series, based on Matthew Quirk’s 2019 novel, has an irresistibly silly hook about one of those shadowy secret agencies within the bowels of government, in this case (barely) traceable back to an unmarked phone in a nondescript room deep inside the White House. FBI agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) manned that phone for the top-secret Night Action division in the first season, until he answered a call from Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), a cybersecurity pro who witnessed the mysterious murders of her espionage-involved aunt and uncle. Peter and Rose were eventually drawn into a twistily absurd political thriller.

After the wild events of those first 10 episodes, which naturally included a vice-presidential conspiracy and a brazen attempt on the president’s life, the second season finds Peter promoted to an active field member of the Night Action team, while Rose has gone back to the private sector—despite the romantic connection they shared during their previous adventure.

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They’re not apart for long. The season opens with a compromised mission in Thailand that leads Peter to go AWOL for a month, and a worried Rose tracks him down. As before, the series moves forward quickly while periodically flashing back, this time to Rose and Peter’s lives in between the two seasons. New character Catherine Weaver (Gossip Girl‘s Amanda Warren) features prominently in both present and past, as a Night Action head who isn’t sure whether she trusts Peter. Naturally, he’s not so sure about her, either. (It often feels as if Peter wants to form his own renegade-within-the-renegade Night Action group.)

As the newcomer with perhaps the most screen time, Catherine is so no-nonsense she borders on nonsensical (at one point, she attempts to truncate an important meeting on the basis that she already wasted too much time traveling to it, apparently not understanding the idea of “worth your while”), a condition not aided by some of Warren’s flatter line readings. But then, the returning characters aren’t wildly exciting, either.

Before this series, Basso was perhaps best-known for the Sisyphean task of attempting to bring movie-world charisma to the role of mom-abandoning Yale weiner JD Vance in the film version of Hillbilly Elegy. He’s better here, but assigning his character to the field only makes him seem that much more like a poor man’s Jack Reacher. Buchanan is likable, if hamstrung by Rose’s tendency to say exactly what she’s feeling. Do Peter and Rose have actual chemistry, or do they just fall into each other’s arms in times of crisis? That’s a question that doesn’t appear to interest series creator Shawn Ryan or his writers. Remember, this is the TV version of a page-turner: plot and action, plot and action.

Conventional wisdom, then, would dictate that getting too deep into the details of this season’s globe-hopping, multi-thread story—as before, there are scenes without Peter or Rose that eventually reveal their importance to the master plot—would not just constitute spoilers, but deny the show its chief pleasure of those page-turning reveals.

This review will be spoiler-free, but frankly, the show’s breakneck plotting can be more exhausting than exhilarating. The Night Agent is too eager to please (and too Netflix-y in its reliance on spoken exposition rather than visual storytelling) to become fatally murky, but despite some impressive action, it doesn’t hit that hard, either. And when the show ventures into the intersection between geopolitical ethics and family dynamics in the middle of the season, and then starts dropping the big T-word (The Night Agent is apparently a show about trauma now), viewers might find themselves wishing it would stick to the dumb stuff.

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The Night Agent remains a slick diversion in its second season, and maybe the show is damned either way—doomed to be dismissed as dopey when it plays to its strengths, and overreaching when it tries to stretch into more serious drama. Then again, maybe it alternates between those two strategies with conscious purpose, just another way to keep itself moving before the whole thing blows up.

Jesse Hassenger

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