This story contains minor spoilers for Season 2 of The Night Manager.
A supercut of the finest moments in 21st century espionage would slap. Dead drops in Guangzhou. Phony NGOs in Azerbaijan. Keen junior agents from BRICS running laps around the uncs from Vauxhall and from Langley. Set the hypothetical TikTok to Future’s “Turn on Me” and you would have elite content.
Reality can run duller. Ten years ago, in 2016, we got a glimpse into the sloppy and cringe versions of intelligence work, after American foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos failed to keep his trap shut about Russia while enjoying London’s finer wine bars. When an Australian foreign officer—likely the vibiest set of bureaucrats—thinks that you have been overserved, you have a problem. It ended for George with an FBI arrest and a stint in federal prison.
At the same time that George was crashing out in tasteful rooms in London in 2016, the BBC released The Night Manager, a visually luxurious, well-cast spy miniseries that leaned on that hotel life. After a tragedy while working in a luxury hotel in Cairo during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Tom Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine—a British Army vet—pays penance behind the reception desk of a luxurious Swiss one. The notorious arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie, essentially playing Milton’s version of Satan in resort wear) checks in, and Pine has another crisis of conscience. He reports Roper to the MI6 contacts who tried to help him in Egypt. From there, Pine allows himself to be flipped into a non-official-cover agent for the UK and insinuates himself with Roper.
Filmed on location in Zermatt, in the south of Spain and in Morocco, the first season of The Night Manager was weapons-grade escapism and—no judgement—the tip of the spear for Hiddleston’s James Bond audition. Speedboats. Violent loyalty tests from Roper who rightly suspects Pine of not being who he says he is. An affair with Roper’s glacially beautiful, forlorn mistress, played by Elizabeth Debicki. Dodging Roper’s right-hand man played by Tom Hollander who, while neither particularly big nor yoked, absolutely owned his role as the squirrely sociopathic enforcer. Hollander won a BAFTA for his work. The episodes hit like a fine Mediterranean breeze, freshening audiences after too many clammy, provincial post-Mystic River, True Detective-era thrillers that could be more exacting than entertaining. The Night Manager was about hot people in hot places drinking smooth drinks and kissing their way through arms deals. No childhood trauma needed.
A decade later, we’ve got Season 2 of The Night Manager, now a BBC and Amazon co-production. David Farr, who wrote every episode of the first season in 2016, wrote the entirety of season two as well. Georgi Banks-Davies directs every episode. The finale airs Sunday. It remains a gorgeous watch. This season Pine is fully inside the intelligence community, in charge of a team of spies who work the desks at London’s fancier hotels to note the comings and goings of the global elite. It’s a little YA as far as premises go, but whatever gets us glimpses of glassine lobby marble and the kinds of martini service that yeeted George Papadopoulos into mild treason. Arms dealers emerge again and Pine’s operation gets torpedoed. We follow him as he roots out the baddies among the hotels and villas in Colombia. How both Rosewood and Aman missed the sponcon opportunity here, I’ll never know.
To match the beautiful places, beautiful people fill this year’s cast. Diego Calva plays antagonist Teddy Dos Santos, mesmerizing and unstable and wearing linen suits like a tiger wears its stripes. Pine’s ally is a Colombian businesswoman played by Camila Morrone. The MI6 officials working with Pine include Indira Varma and Kirby Howell-Baptiste. The intelligence community has become a baddie-rich environment.