‘The Night Manager’ Season 2 Review: Back in the Shadows, This Time in Colombia (Prime Video)

It’s easy to assume there’s a vast gap between reality and fiction, that what appears on screen has little to do with how things actually work. Yet watching the second season of The Night Manager just hours after news broke of a U.S. military operation in Venezuela that extracted Nicolás Maduro—an operation that must have involved months of planning, agents, spies, and infiltration—suggests otherwise. Perhaps these literary fantasies aren’t quite as far-fetched as they seem. That uneasy overlap between the plausible and the preposterous is, in many ways, where their appeal lies.

Back in 2016, The Night Manager felt like a genuine novelty. Sophisticated, globe-trotting espionage stories with top-tier casts were still largely the domain of cinema, mostly because of budgets and star power. The clever move here was to bring a respected John le Carré novel to television, wrap it in the BBC’s seal of “quality,” and front it with names like Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman. Add elegant, vaguely “exotic” locations, a solid narrative engine, and glossy, film-level production values, and success was practically guaranteed.

Le Carré, however, never wrote a sequel—and at the time, no one seemed terribly bothered by that. The Night Manager arrived, made its mark, and quietly disappeared. But almost a decade later, someone (Amazon Prime) decided to spend a great deal of money, the market proved hungry for recognisable IP, and voilà: season two was born. Hiddleston and Colman return, joined by a new cast, new picturesque backdrops (I assume Colombia counts as “exotic” if you’re British), and a few rather elaborate narrative contortions designed to extend the saga of Jonathan Pine, the hotel manager turned undercover operative.

The new season opens four years after the events of the first, with a brief scene in which a visibly worn-down Pine and his Foreign Office handler Angela Burr (Colman) identify the body of arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie), the original season’s villain. Cut to the present: Pine is still very much haunted, somewhere between anxious and traumatised by his brutal past experience. He’s been given yet another identity—now going by Alex Goodwin—and an oddly specific new job. He runs the “Night Owls,” a unit tasked with monitoring suspicious nocturnal activity in hotels, usually via security cameras. It sounds dull enough to keep him out of trouble. Naturally, it doesn’t.

Before anyone shouts “that sounds like Slow Horses,” it’s worth clarifying that Pine-as-played-by-Hiddleston is almost the polar opposite of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb. That said, despite The Night Manager not being particularly interested in humour, the similarities are hard to ignore. Pine’s carefully controlled routine starts to unravel when Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge), his boss and one of the few people who knows his true identity, dies under distinctly suspicious circumstances. The death appears to be connected both to a group of Colombian traffickers (not exactly a bold new choice) and to the possibility that someone inside MI6 may be working with—or for—them.

Following an explosive incident in Catalonia, Pine/Goodwin is forced to assume yet another alias and travel to Colombia, where he infiltrates the circle of Teddy De Santos (Diego Calva, Babylon), an intense trafficker with ties to Pine’s past. Teddy’s partner, Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone), appears to be playing her own double game, and the trio become entangled in a glossy carousel of luxury hotels, mansions, and high-end restaurants around Medellín and Cartagena (not “Cartagenia,” despite what several characters insist on calling it), all while negotiating arms shipments and trading in secrets and lies.

The series remains watchable and, at times, genuinely tense—the undercover operative is a reliable dramatic device when handled properly—but it has also become noticeably more conventional. Part of that is simply timing: prestige-flavoured espionage drama is now a streaming staple rather than a novelty, unlike in 2016. And partly it’s because “Latin American traffickers,” at least for viewers who actually live in the region, feel far more schematic and less dramatically rich than the corrupt grandees of the British upper classes. Add to that the fact that two out of every three “Colombians” on screen are not Colombian at all (Calva, Morrone, Unax Ugalde, and Alberto Ammann among them), plus a handful of export-ready Latin clichés, and the series inevitably loses some of the originality that once set it apart.

Directed in its entirety by Georgi Banks-Davies (the first season was handled by Susanne Bier), this new run of The Night Manager is slick and enjoyable, if increasingly predictable—elegant, but in a Caribbean-meets-Miami sort of way, and stylish even as it flirts with becoming a greatest-hits remix of glossier spy stories than Le Carré never had much patience for. A third season is already on the way, clearly signalling an ambition to turn Jonathan Pine into a franchise figure in the mould of James Bond, Jason Bourne, or Jack Ryan. It may well work, and Hiddleston might secure a second canonical role to sit alongside Loki. But it’s hard to imagine Pine ever inspiring the same affection—or laughs—as the gloriously filthy Jackson Lamb and his band of “slow horses.” Lamb may not use shampoo or wear linen shirts, but his grubby charm remains beyond imitation.