The Night Agent returns with more confidence and a tighter pace

In 2023, Netflix’s The Night Agent opened with a hook that could be called Hitchockian in how it sucked an ordinary guy into an extraordinary (and arguably even ridiculous) international conspiracy. FBI grunt Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) was assigned the thankless desk duty of being a Night Action telephone operator, a sort of 911 for agents who can’t go through normal channels when they need help. A tech whiz, Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), ends up calling Peter when her aunt and uncles are murdered in the middle of the night, setting in motion a series of increasingly remarkable events that ended with the attempted assassination of the President of the United States. It was an entertaining show that recalled 24 in both its pacing and the suspension of disbelief needed to enjoy it. And it was a hit for Netflix, making a second season inevitable. 

When you go as big as the writers, led by the great Shawn Ryan (The Shield), did in season one, it leaves two options for a sophomore outing—and scribes often pick the wrong one, presuming that a sequel needs to be bigger and louder than the project before it. Ryan knows he can’t really get crazier than a season that ends with an attack on Camp David, so he has actually delivered a more streamlined second season of The Night Agent, an outing that still sees our heroes working to stop an international incident but with more confidence and satisfying thrills, as well as tighter in-episode pacing. The first season may have worked better as pure ridiculous escapism, but the second season makes clear what The Night Agent could be in the long run: a successor to the Jack Bauer brand of rogue agent who can save the day (without the dicey politics around torture). 

Season two kicks off with Peter, now an in-field agent himself, on a mission in Bangkok with a colleague, Alice (Brittany Snow). It turns out that their cover has been blown, which leads to the death of Alice and Peter going on the run. Wondering how on Earth his mission could have gone so wrong prompts Peter to presume that he can trust no one…except Rose, of course. The first arc of this batch doesn’t have the same immediately catchy concept as the one in the show’s freshman season, but be patient: It’s not long before the series finds its footing again with Rose and Peter reunited and trying to figure out who they can trust. 

The writers of the second season of The Night Agent surround Peter with three strong female characters, a decision that doesn’t feel coincidental and gives the show a different energy than so many testosterone-heavy modern espionage series. The women often lead with heart and head here while the men are typically incompetent, greedy idiots (or loyal soldiers for idiots). The always reliable (if a bit underwritten) Rose returns as a character who hasn’t been ground down by the machine of the espionage game, free to rely her heart as much as her training. Her instinctual empathy and sharp intelligence actively pushes back against the idea that a spy’s greatest weakness is his or her personal connections. In The Night Agent, both heroes and villains have such personal ties, and they typically uplift the former and tear down the latter. Good people depend on those around them; bad people are betrayed by them. 

The other two characters emerge from incredibly different parts of the world. First, there’s the effective Amanda Warren as Catherine, the handler for Alice and Peter who doesn’t quite trust that the new guy is ready for this challenge and even questions if he played a role in Alice’s death. Catherine is a remarkably prominent character, having nearly as much agency and screen time as the two leads, which feels like it throws off the balance at first but ultimately works as Warren leans into the role of some who has earned her distrust of the world around her.



Even more effective than Warren is the excellent Arienne Mandi as Noor, an aide to the mysterious Javad (Keon Alexander), the head of security to the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations (Navid Negahban). Noor discovers that Javad, and possibly his boss, are involved in the theft of a mobile lab that has been producing chemical weapons. She attempts to use the intelligence to save her brother and mother from Iran and bring them to safety in the United States. Mandi is phenomenal, giving the show a much-needed emotional foundation as the average person stuck in an extraordinary situation.

Sparked by the solid writing of Ryan and his team, the second season of The Night Agent features a number of fine supporting performances, including Berto Colon as Solomon, a muscle man who wants a bit more out of his position, and the fantastic Louis Herthum (Westworld) as Jacob Monroe, the power broker pulling all the strings. A scene in which Solomon asks for a raise after years of doing Jacob’s dirty work is a gem, a reminder of how important it is for Ryan to ground his unrelatable spy extremes in relatable characters. It’s the kind of balance between plotting and personality that he’s been refining for years. 

If most spy shows are about how your human connections will betray you, The Night Agent clearly asserts that a spy has to be empathetic to succeed—and that it will be the clinically cold villains who are betrayed by their attempts to leave the human condition behind. The show is not perfect (Basso and Buchanan still lack chemistry in a way that sometimes makes them feel more like siblings than lovers), but it’s consistently entertaining for 10 hours, rarely succumbing to the Netflix sag that often sinks shows this long. It’s an easy, thrilling, one-weekend watch—in other words, the Netflix ideal. 

The Night Agent season two premieres January 23 on Netflix