Night Agent season two on Netflix review: this action-fest is missing the original's magic
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Aristotle usually applied the idea of the golden mean to ethics, but if you’d asked him to place the Night Agent Season One on his sliding scale, he would have plonked it squarely in that Goldilocks zone (if he hadn’t died 2,345 years before it was broadcast).
The Night Agent was perfect TV, the ideal spy/action thriller to race through. Somehow it had the just the right balance of mystery, suspense, action, and rollicking plot. It was Netflix’s most viewed show in 2023, but despite that also oddly hard to explain. I couldn’t quite tell friends why I had binged it in a week, only that despite that apparent blandness it had just worked.
So the second season, which is out today, has a lot to live up to – and a very narrow landing zone in which to get it right (given that season one had something so mystical about what made it good). Sadly, season two misses it. The action begins in Bangkok (complete with repeated shots of a giant golden Buddha statue) where we meet Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), now a bonafide Night Agent, rather than a man whose action-hero talents are severely under utilised by his job sitting in a basement waiting by a phone. Matters don’t take long to kick off big style and it’s all very thrilling: suspicious looking men, dead drops, foot chases, hand-to-hand combat and shoot-outs across a city where things explode satisfyingly into blooming clouds of debris.
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