The Night Manager Season 1 was AMC’s adaptation of John le Carre’s post-Cold War novel. Published in 1993, Night Manager follows a British soldier-turned-luxury hotel auditor (Tom Hiddleston) who gets roped into an intelligence operation (Olivia Colman) to take down an internationally renowned arms dealer (Hugh Laurie).
The Night Manager Season 1 was the story behind the 1993 novel, which become a hugely successful BBC television drama.
The most striking thing about The Night Manager, the gripping BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s novel is that it is true. Not literally a true story of course. The events and people depicted in the drama never existed. There is no semi-independent internal investigation unit within MI6 called the International Enforcement Agency. But, Suave, sophisticated, discreet: the real-life hotel manager who inspired le Carré.
The book and series revolve around the establishment of trust: the building of confidence between an agent and his source, between an agent and the officer controlling him, and between an agent and the target. The MI6 officer Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) must persuade Pine to trust her; he in turn must get the evil Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) to trust him.
Hiddleston with Elizabeth Debicki (Jed), Tom Hollander (Corkoran) and Hugh Laurie (Roper) in Roper’s lair, La Forteleza DES WILLIE/BBC
The Night Manager miniseries was a six episodes event series, directed by Susanne Bier and co-produced by AMC, BBC One (which was air it in Great Britain) and Ink Factory. David Farr (Spooks) wrote the adaptation.
The first season starred Olivia Colman, Hugh Laurie, David Hareweood, Katherine Kelly Tom Hollander, Elizabeth Debicki and Tobias Menzies. It nabbed three Golden Globes, awarding Hiddleston, Laurie and Coleman for their work in the limited series. It also scored two Emmys (for directing and musical composition).
There were some classic Le Carré lines in the penultimate, episode of Season 1: “Anyone can betray anyone,” then, later, “the whole system keeps the country where we want it ... we made Richard Roper”.
The Night Manager season 2 would come seven years after the first's original run…but is finally coming, with Tom Hiddleston returning as the protagonist currently in the works at Amazon Prime Video and BBC.
Le Carré never actually wrote a sequel to the novel The Night Manager is based on, preferring always to just write standalone stories, which means there's no existing blueprint to base a second outing.
According to Deadline, the next series will meet Hiddleston's Pine in the present-day learning the news that Laurie's Roper has been killed in custody. That revelation triggers a series of events more deadly and challenging than the first.
There's no news yet on whether anyone else from the original series is coming back, although Colman's MI5 agent makes sense as an ally as well as Debicki's Jed from the romantic past. With Laurie's character dead on impact, it's unlikely he'll be back.
Filming is set to start this summer in the UK and South America, supposedly on a two-season order. If that goes ahead as planned, it's unlikely we'll get anything before 2024, especially considering how glossy and high-budget the first go around was.
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