After a decade away, The Night Manager returns without an ounce of fat
Tom Hiddleston is back in Prime Video's suave, sexy, and smart spy series.
Photo: Des Willie/Prime
The 2016 BBC One and AMC adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager was one of the better miniseries of its era. Made with the production values of a prestige film and a cast to match that budget in Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Laurie, it nabbed awards and landed on some top-10 lists that year. Perhaps best of all, it felt refreshingly complete, with a story that reached a satisfying endpoint. And yet now, somehow, The Night Manager is back 10 years later.
The good news is that this is no mere cash grab. As surprising as it is to see another chapter in the life of Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine a decade on, the second season of The Night Manager is nearly as good as the first. This is suave, sexy, scintillating, and adult spy stuff. And the promise of an already-greenlit third round only makes answering the call of this one that much more enticing.
In the years since he destroyed the illegal arms empire of the truly evil Richard Roper (Laurie), Jonathan Pine has been living a relatively simple life. He works under the name Alex Goodwin, running a low-level surveillance unit for MI6 known as the Night Owls, which is basically just a tier above Slough House in the pecking order. He knows what he’s doing, stays to himself, and has a good loyal team of collaborators, including Sally Price-Jones (Hayley Squires) and his old ally Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge).
On an assignment, Pine sees a familiar face: one of Roper’s mercenaries from a decade ago. He knows that the people around Roper were as dangerous as they come and suspects something that shifts the power landscape in the world may be going on if someone Roper-adjacent is involved. A shocking death in his inner circle and the ensuing investigation into the assignment leads him into the world of Teddy Dos Santos (Babylon‘s Diego Calva), a Colombian arms dealer with a shady past connected to both Pine and Roper. Calva threads a needle with Teddy, playing him as the kind of guy who knows his good looks and charismatic personality can get him in any room but allowing just enough vulnerability to sneak into the performance to convey a tiny lack of confidence. Can Pine exploit that to stop an arms shipment that could help overthrow a government?
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