The much-anticipated second series of espionage thriller The Night Manager landed on BBC One on New Year’s Day. The original 2016 run, an adaptation by David Farr of John le Carré’s 1993 novel about a Cairo hotel night manager turned spy, was taut, intelligent and confident – basically, James Bond with A-levels. A global hit, it made stars of Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine and Olivia Colman as his MI6 River House handler Angela Burr.
Hugh Laurie was sublime as unscrupulous arms dealer Richard “Dickie” Roper, as was Tom Hollander, playing Lance “Corky” Corkoran, his gimlet-eyed wingman. A long gap feels rather classy when franchises are routinely pumped dry. Still, a lot can happen in 10 years – for one thing, Slow Horses, which has transformed the television spy genre.
Compared with Slow Horses’ one-liner-spewing showman Jackson Lamb, Jonathan Pine seems something of a dry old stick
The second series of The Night Manager is again written by Farr but it’s an original story. It opens four years later in Syria, with a certain someone identified on a mortuary slab. Then, another four years on from that, we rejoin Pine – now called Alex Goodwin – in London as he quietly works for the River House’s nocturnal surveillance unit, the Night Owls. An MI6 psychiatrist smoothly tells him: “You don’t disappoint me… If I’m honest, you frighten me.”
Pine is soon tumbling once more down the geopolitical rabbit hole: deaths, explosions and suspicions about a River House mole. Pine goes undercover in Colombia, cosying up to gunrunner Teddy (Diego Calva from Babylon and Narcos: Mexico). Meanwhile, sex ripples in the air (a throuple could be on the cards); one woman (Camila Morrone) could be an ally or a shark.
There are also nods to series one (a cat called Corky, a visit to Roper’s son), though Colman thus far is a muted presence. It has to be said, however, that compared with Slow Horses’ one-liner-spewing showman, Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, Pine seems something of a dry old stick.
Related articles:
It’s still good though; tense, sharp, reflecting the grim times – the global mess, the bad people and the dirty money. Hiddleston delivers an older, warier Pine but retains his essential otherness, reminding you that this is not just an undercover intelligence story but a mystery about identity.
Who, after all, is Jonathan Pine? In this new outing, he remains tantalisingly unknowable.
Photograph by BBC