‘The Night Agent’ season two review: Netflix spy thriller proposes mission improbable

Though it arrived with relatively little fanfare in March 2023, The Night Agent became a huge hit for Netflix, growing into the streamer’s most-watched show of that year. In a way, its popularity says a lot about the increasingly homogenous content giant. Slick, gripping and rarely bogged down by character development, The Night Agent would once have done well on a traditional TV network.

Based on a bestselling novel by Matthew Quirk, season one followed Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), then a junior FBI agent, as he uncovered a major political conspiracy involving moles in the US government. Peter started the season in the White House basement answering phone calls from ‘night agents’ – shadowy spies who defend American interests away from prying eyes – and ended it saving the President’s life.

This solid second season doesn’t drop the baby – in fact, it wrong-foots us by killing off a sparky new character in the first 10 minutes. She is Alice (Pitch Perfect‘s Brittany Snow), an experienced spy who’s assigned to mentor new night agent Peter during a mission in Bangkok. When things go wrong, he wonders whether he can trust his new boss Catherine (Amanda Warren) and goes off grid. Catherine is under pressure to find him fast, but she’s beaten by Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), the cybersecurity expert and niece of the deceased night agents whom he teamed up with in season one.

Rose is now developing a sophisticated computer program that allows brands to target potential customers using facial recognition, so she simply tweaks its code to scrape the internet for recent images of Peter. Fortunately, he’s laying low in New York – “one of the most surveilled cities in the world”, as Rose notes – and she spots him in the background of someone else’s selfie. It’s not the last time you’ll have to suspend your disbelief: The Night Agent nearly always chooses pace over plausibility.

As Peter tries to find out who killed Alice, he and Rose are sucked into another slippery political conspiracy. This one involves – deep breath! – the Iranian ambassador to the UN (Navid Negahban), the vengeful son of an imprisoned dictator (Rob Heaps) and a marine-turned-fixer who was declared dead several years ago (Berto Colon). It’s knotty and complicated but The Night Agent delivers its big reveals evenly so the plot never gets overwhelming. Nearly every episode ends with an effective cliffhanger.

The show’s faults are still obvious: the dialogue can be stilted and the locations unrealistic. Peter’s new base is a grotty old brownstone by the Brooklyn Bridge that would have been turned into fancy flats by now. And because any backstory tends to serve the plot rather than the characters, nearly everyone here is single-minded in the purest sense – they literally only have one motivation driving them.

None of this prevents The Night Agent from being intensely bingeable. This season doesn’t break the mould but it’s definitely ready to feed the Netflix algorithm.

‘The Night Agent’ season two is available to watch on Netflix from January 23

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