The Night Manager series two: ‘irresistible’ follow-up is ‘smart, compelling’ TV

“Meddling with perfection is a risky proposition,” said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail. When “The Night Manager” first hit the small screen in 2016 the “sublime espionage thriller” was praised by many as “the best Le Carré adaptation in decades”. Another season seemed “inevitable”.

After a decade-long wait, the hotly anticipated follow-up is finally here. From the first few episodes it appears to be “another classy thriller”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, “albeit suffering from the lack of Hugh Laurie as cold-blooded arms dealer Richard Roper and Tom Hollander as his scene-stealing sidekick, Corky”.

Picking up a few years after the events of the first series, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is still haunted by his mission that brought down Roper. Now, he is trying to live a quiet life, running an unglamorous subdivision of MI6 – the Night Owls – dedicated to the nocturnal surveillance of luxury hotels.

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“Hang on! Has ‘The Night Manager’ gone fully ‘Slow Horses?’” said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Only briefly: when Pine spots a “familiar face” his “complexion changes from magnolia to ivory”, and he soon turns back into a “proper spy”, this time infiltrating a Colombian drugs cartel with ties to Roper.

Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva) is a “much more generic antagonist” than Roper, and the show “loses its naughty glint when Pine isn’t directly up against other members of the British upper classes”. There is also something “fundamentally gauche” about the way the second season attempts to replicate the “dynamic” of the first. Still, it “floats far above most of the competition”.

There is “much to be admired” here, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. “The pace, the intrigue, the sly sexiness; all are retained.” At the end of the first two episodes I was keen to see more. “That’s the sign of good TV.”

The show returns at a time when the tone of spy thrillers has “shifted” towards the “arch rather than the po-faced”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times. But “The Night Manager” is “almost defiantly strait-laced and serious”; there’s something “soothing” about its “refusal to bow to current trends”.

In all, it’s a “smart, compelling” follow-up to the first series, said Caryn James on BBC Culture. The trailer features a scene where Jonathan, Teddy Dos Santos and his girlfriend Roxana embrace in what appears to be a “steamy threesome”. Is this just another ruse? “It’s one of many questions that makes the series, with all its shadows and ambiguity, irresistible.”