{"id":367118,"date":"2026-01-13T05:21:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T05:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/367118\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T05:21:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T05:21:14","slug":"the-night-manager-season-2-review-not-worth-the-wait","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/367118\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Night Manager’ Season 2 Review: Not Worth the Wait"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tTo the extent that \u201cThe Night Manager<\/a>\u201d has survived in the cultural memory since the limited series \u2014 adapted from the John Le Carr\u00e9 novel on the same time \u2014\u00a0aired a full decade ago, it was as a showcase for pretty people in pretty places. (It made sense that director Susanne Bier would go on to helm \u201cThe Perfect Couple,\u201d a murder mystery starring Nicole Kidman and set at a destination wedding in Nantucket.) For a while, the show seemed like it could kick off a Le Carr\u00e9 revival; Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook delivered an underrated take<\/a> on \u201cThe Little Drummer Girl\u201d with rising star Florence Pugh the following year. But the trend never took off, and \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d lived on largely as images of Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Elizabeth Debicki swanning around Switzerland and Mallorca. Much like an actual vacation, its transportive power was directly linked to its finite end.<\/p>\n

\n\tTen years later, however, \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d is back, as is Hiddleston\u2019s soldier-turned-hospitality-professional-turned-spy Jonathan Pine. Screenwriter David Farr has extended Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s story past its original conclusion, resulting in an odd hybrid: characters like Pine and his handler Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) remain the same, while the director (Georgia Banks-Davies), the BBC\u2019s American production partner (Amazon Prime Video, taking over from AMC) and the setting are all new. In shifting the action to Colombia, \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d can at least continue to deliver on stunning vistas and escapist intrigue. But after watching all six episodes of Season 2, I still wasn\u2019t convinced this property \u2014 no hotel pun intended \u2014 needed revisiting, let alone expansion. At least a very dark cliffhanger ending sets up an already announced<\/a> Season 3, even if it somewhat contradicts the easy-viewing appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSet nine years after the events of Season 1, Jonathan no longer works in hotels \u2014 the profession that first brought him into contact with arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie), whose body he and Angela identify in an opening flashback, and served as a compelling, specific hook. (Thanks to Jonathan, Roper owed hundreds of millions of dollars to some powerful creditors, who kept him captive for years before dumping his corpse in Syria.) Instead, Jonathan helps run a remote surveillance squad within the Foreign Office known as the Night Owls, spying on targets (often in hotel rooms!) remotely and at all hours of the day. But despite the new job and a new, assumed name, Jonathan is still haunted by his experience with Roper, an amoral hedonist whose luxurious lifestyle was bankrolled by bloodshed. When an old associate of Roper\u2019s resurfaces, Jonathan throws himself back into the fray in pursuit of a man billing himself as Roper\u2019s spiritual successor: Colombian arms magnate Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tColombia is a country beautiful enough to deliver the stunning scenery one expects of \u201cThe Night Manager,\u201d from lush jungles to historic cities, and stable enough to host a major TV production. But the memory of decades-long civil unrest, largely ended by a peace agreement signed in 2016, is still fresh enough to provide a real-life context for Teddy\u2019s machinations. Calva is a captivating screen presence whose raffish charisma is a solid substitute for Laurie\u2019s plummy, posh playboy \u2014 though the one-time \u201cNarcos: Mexico\u201d star deserves more roles beyond the Central American underworld, like his naive dreamer in Damien Chazelle\u2019s 2022 film \u201cBabylon.\u201d \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d is nonetheless Jonathan\u2019s show, and while Season 2 has its moments, it\u2019s ultimately unable to cultivate him into a George Smiley-like figure. Smiley, a more famous Le Carr\u00e9 creation, could tie together multiple otherwise unrelated stories over multiple books (and subsequent adaptations). Jonathan doesn\u2019t hold up to the same sustained scrutiny. The same chameleonic blandness that makes him so suited to espionage makes for an inherently unmemorable hero.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe shamelessly Bond-inspired opening credits to \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d \u2014 soaring strings over graphics of guns firing and rosaries shattering \u2014\u00a0no longer align with Jonathan\u2019s tortured, traumatized mental state. An entanglement with Miami-based shipping broker Roxana Bola\u00f1os (Camila Morrone) recalls that iconic character\u2019s revolving door of paramours, and Jonathan\u2019s new boss Mayra (Indira Varma) could give Judi Dench\u2019s M a run for her money in hard-nosed severity. But Hiddleston\u2019s aged-up, haunted Jonathan is more dour than debonair, even if he retains the actor\u2019s easy elegance. I can\u2019t say I spent much time in the intervening years since Season 1 wondering what became of the reluctant spook, nor did I find him an especially enjoyable hang after our reunion. New colleagues Waleed (Anil Desai), Basil (Paul Chahidi) and Sally (Hayley Squires) never rise above the level of accessories to Jonathan\u2019s obsessive pursuit of closure, let alone to that of a potential co-protagonist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Night Manager\u201d eventually establishes a more direct link between the two seasons, a blatant bit of revisionism that still facilitates a more dynamic back half of this new chapter. By then, however, it\u2019s a little late. The viewer has long since started to wonder why Farr didn\u2019t set his sights on another Le Carr\u00e9 yarn, or simply started fresh in Colombia without the need for British interlopers. Season 1 of \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d was a success, but not such a world-conquering hit that a follow-up is almost economically mandatory, as with \u201cBig Little Lies.\u201d Season 2 is not without enjoyable intrigue, yet never proves worth the risk of opening a closed (literal) book.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first three episodes of \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d Season 2 will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video on Jan. 11, with remaining episodes streaming weekly on Sundays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To the extent that \u201cThe Night Manager\u201d has survived in the cultural memory since the limited series \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,102759,391,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-367118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-the-night-manager","10":"tag-tv","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}