The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed.<\/p>\n
But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character\u2019s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn\u2019t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov\u2019s misidentified corpse.<\/p>\n
Now the cat\u2019s out of the bag in all the papers, though, I might as well acknowledge that Laurie makes a surprise reappearance at the end of episode three. Let\u2019s hope he can inject a bit of excitement into the series.<\/p>\n
So far I don\u2019t feel as if I\u2019ve been enjoying it on its own merits. Rather, like le Grand Meaulnes in search of his lost domain, I\u2019ve been watching it in the hope of recapturing some of its predecessor\u2019s nostalgia-inducing magic.<\/p>\n
What made the original so good? It really ought to have been a flop because its premise was so fundamentally flawed: that the most hateful man in the world, someone we the viewer should yearn to see being destroyed at any cost, was a pukka, Panama hat-wearing arms dealer called Richard Roper.<\/p>\n
OK, so Roper did horrible things, like having nice people tortured or murdered. But none of this behaviour felt psychologically convincing. One suspected that it was all a rather desperate plot device by an out-of-ideas author (John le Carr\u00e9) to make Roper more detestably villainous. I\u2019m not suggesting that arms dealers are misunderstood saints. What I am saying is that arms dealers are just middlemen (as an ex-intelligence services man, Le Carr\u00e9 would have known this). Far, far worse in the baddie league are the people who engineer the wars that employ them (the CIA, Mossad and Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s old outfit, inter alia); and worse still are the shiftless global elites for whom those wars are the primary business model.<\/p>\n
So, no, I was never rooting for Richard Roper to come to a sticky end as much as I felt the plot contrivances in season one were trying to tell me to be. But I didn\u2019t mind this because everything else about the series was so perfect: the casting, the costumes, the apparently limitless budgeting, and above all, the sumptuous locations.<\/p>\n
It was like James Bond without the tongue-in-cheekness. When Bond schmoozes into yet another of his exotic locales, you\u2019re never not aware that this is a fantasy world which exists only on the big screen. But we\u2019ve all \u2013 Spectator readers have, anyway \u2013 been to places a bit like La Fortaleza, the former 17th-century fortress, now a private estate, in Pollensa, Majorca, which served as Roper\u2019s lair in season one. Probably we didn\u2019t get to stay the night there. But we might at least have been invited for drinks. Or, failing that, insisted on giving a lift to a friend who\u2019d been invited for drinks, just so we could get a peek inside the guarded gates.<\/p>\n
Trying now to recall that first series \u2013 which I haven\u2019t seen since it came out in 2016 \u2013 what I remember most vividly are scenes like the ones where Roper and his family and entourage are having an extended lunch in one of those Mediterranean restaurants, right next to the sea, that cost you an arm and a leg, but to which, again, all of us have been. The social observations \u2013 the interactions, for example, between rich parents, children and nanny \u2013 were so accurate, the setting and behaviour so recognisable, it made what could have been a contrived, silly plot seem utterly believable and the preposterous scenarios more relatable.<\/p>\n
What this lifestyles-of-the-uber-rich travel pornography also did was give the series space to breathe. Watching a very tense thriller, where people could die at any moment, and where you\u2019re always on tenterhooks as to whether the baddies are going to walk in before the goodie has had time to finish downloading the software, can be draining. What The Night Manager did was give us the occasional break from the relentless emotional torture by building in a bit of \u2018me time\u2019 for the viewer, like when you\u2019re overwhelmed with guests and you sneak off to a quiet room for a private coffee and cigarette and a rifle through Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveller. The White Lotus is probably the finest exponent of this. But The Night Manager got there first.<\/p>\n
Season two is much more generic thriller than its predecessor. Also \u2013 perhaps he was like this before, but I don\u2019t remember it \u2013 Tom Hiddleston\u2019s character Jonathan Pine is pretty unappealing: essentially a humourless, vengeful prig, who\u2019s implausibly brilliant at being a spy. In one scene, in order to gain the trust of season two chief baddie \u2013 a delightfully louche Colombian Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) \u2013 he ingests so much cocaine and booze he comes close to ODing. Yet still, somehow, he manages to keep his head and say the cunning things required to ensnare Dos Santos. Later the new season\u2019s love interest Roxana Bolanos (Camila Morrone) asks him how he managed this. Pine doesn\u2019t answer. Because there is no answer, the viewer realises: that scene was just the purest bollocks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239276,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96814,156,16695,113932,111,139,69,85487,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-239275","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-bbc1","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-hugh-laurie","11":"tag-john-le-carre","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-the-night-manager","16":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}