‘The Night Manager’ Is the Best Anti-Bond Spy Series Available

You could call Tom Hiddleston’s spy series The Night Manager the James Bond of television. Certainly, nothing currently on TV has the same Bond-esque trappings: a handsome, charismatic lead, a picturesque overseas setting, a beautiful yet morally gray female co-lead, even a brassy theme and hypnotic opening titles that recall that famous gun barrel sequence. As a John le Carré adaptation, it has less in common with the moody drama of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or The Russia House than it does with action blockbusters like Casino Royale or Dr. No, and focuses just as much on that action-movie flashiness as it does on compelling character drama.

And yet, it’s not all fun and games in The Night Manager, either. The show nods at the world’s most famous spy franchise while having things its own way, free to experiment with a more grounded and emotional approach to its tale of interweaving spy games. Its protagonist, Hiddleston’s chameleonic secret agent Jonathan Pine, comes with a load of baggage in the show’s currently airing second season, despite his claims that “I will not explode.” The truth is that he’s still unable to release the complicated feelings about his original target, Hugh Laurie’s arms dealer villain Richard Roper, whom Pine surveilled, grew close to, and then betrayed at the end of Season 1. Once Pine is embedded yet again in the den of another bad guy, Colombian arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), the same patterns begin to emerge.

BBC/Prime Video

A character like Pine would probably fit in well with the Bond universe and tone: he’s suave, he’s charismatic, and he’s good at getting himself out of scrapes. He’s also game for romancing any woman who finds herself between him and his quarry — this season, that’s Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone), a Colombian businesswoman who’s living with Teddy but keeping her options open. But The Night Manager is, more than anything else, a psychological study buried underneath a layer of secret spy action, more interested in examining what happens to the mind of a person whose job it is to make friends of his enemies. Pine is really, really good at convincing people he’s their comrade, and he is tortured by that very fact. What kind of person is so good at faking friendship that it’s their literal job? An action movie wouldn’t have the time for all of that in the same way that a six-hour television season does.

In a landscape of spy stories that are either one thing or the other, The Night Manager is unique in how it makes a home for itself in the gulf between the fantasy of Bond and the pointedly gritty realism of something like the Bourne series. Part of that grounding energy comes in the form of Pine’s allies this season, surveillance technicians Basil Karapetian (Paul Chahidi) and Sally Price-Jones (Hayley Squires). While Pine is off swimming in Teddy’s pool and having fancy dinners with Roxana, Basil and Sally are doing the sort of grunt work you wouldn’t normally see, calling intelligence sources on secret phones and faking bank transfers so Pine can keep up his facade. Spying, despite what Hollywood would have us believe, is rarely a one-man job.

Maybe that’s what makes The Night Manager feel like the perfect anti-James Bond series, despite the obvious Amazon connection between the two. (Amazon MGM Studios recently acquired creative control of the Bond franchise, and Amazon Prime Video co-owns The Night Manager with the BBC and streams the series in the U.S.) It can be fun and frothy in one scene, reveling in its summery South American setting, and in the next, slowly zoom in on one of its main characters having a panic attack. The show is free to have it both ways, using the expected tropes of the genre we’re familiar with and spinning them in different directions, focusing on the details we would normally ignore, and keeping its audience on their toes. That is, after all, what all good spy stories are supposed to accomplish.

It doesn’t necessarily signal a shift away from one thing or the other. There will always be plenty of room for fantastical action-driven secret agent flicks and for toned-down character studies focusing on the personal price of international espionage. But The Night Manager does prove that the best types of these stories find some way to combine the two, and that it’s even possible to spin an exciting action narrative around one man’s crisis of conscience. In a pivotal scene in an early episode, Pine begs Teddy to “Make me clean” in order to forge a strong connection between them. He’s playing a character, feigning desperation, but the desperation comes from a real place. The best lies always do.