Tom Hiddleston, Camila Morrone and Diego Calva in 'The Night Manager' season two. The Ink Factory/BBC/Amazon Photographer: Des Willie Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text When he originally adapted John le Carré's The Night Manager for BBC One and AMC, David Farr reshaped a key narrative thread from the 1993 novel involving the covert arming of Colombian drug cartels in order to keep the action centered primarily in the Middle East. Presumably, that felt like a more geographically timely approach. A cerebral thriller boosted by the performances from Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, The Night Manager was a huge hit in the UK and a major awards player in the States, but the six-episode series' March 2016 finale felt generally resolved. AMC moved back in the le Carré catalogue to The Little Drummer Girl, another contained six-parter that I actually preferred for Florence Pugh's star turn and the flashy direction from Park Chan-wook, though it was less of a smash. The Night Manager The Bottom Line Gets good once it stops living in the past. Airdate: Sunday, January 11 (Amazon)Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Diego Calva, Camila Morrone, Hayley Squires, Paul Chahidi, Indira Varma, Olivia ColmanCreator: David FarrDirector: Georgi Banks-Davies The BBC announced in 2024 that it was bringing The Night Manager back, with Amazon now serving as domestic distributor, but it didn't seem like there was much urgency, even when plot descriptions suggested that Farr was reinstating the Colombian locations from the book. As recently as six months ago, the storyline of a Western superpower fronting economically motivated regime change in South America sounded more reflective - nods to American interventions in Nicaragua or Panama in the '80s - than prescient. Heck, even last week when season two of The Night Manager premiered in the UK, the story was still tantalizingly speculative. But timing is everything, and suddenly, with the U.S. launching military operations in Venezuela and barely even denying the importance of natural resources as motivation, Amazon is sitting on its savviest piece of geopolitical fiction since that clip of John Krasinski's Jack Ryan talking about the strategic importance of Venezuela went viral. It's still hard to deny that Farr is wildly over-relying on viewer investment in characters and storylines from a 10-year-old limited series. But with ample clumsy exposition to provide a refresher, the resurrection of The Night Manager has gone from solidly entertaining to grippingly immediate practically overnight. The new series - ordered with a third installment, so don't expect closure - begins with Hiddleston's Jonathan Pine, a British intelligent agent plucked from the desk of a Swiss hotel, and handler Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) identifying the body of nefariously charismatic arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie). All I'll say here, keeping spoilers to a minimum, is "It's not so simple" and "There's a reason Amazon is doing a three-episode launch for the season." In the present day, nine years after the original finale, Pine is working under the name "Alex Goodwin" and leading an intelligence team called the Night Owls. They are, as people repeatedly observe, in surveillance and not operations, which is just the way Pine wants it. The only people who know his previous identity are Angela, retired to a villa somewhere, and Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge), a good man and therefore not long for this morally compromised world. Certainly Pine's new boss, Indira Varma's Mayra Cavendish, doesn't know and isn't overburdened with morality. So the Night Owls are for surveillance and not operations, at least until Pine spots a familiar face, somebody with ties to Roper. That familiar face leads to an off-the-book operation, which leads to tragedy and then, in turn, leads Pine to Colombia and nefariously charismatic arms dealer Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), whose balancing of black market munitions and forward-looking charitable endeavors is right out of the Richard Roper playbook. Soon, Pine and Sally (Hayley Squires), a fellow Night Owl whose skillset is best defined as "computer," are in Colombia. The only person they can trust back at The River House is the genial Basil (the superb Paul Chahidi). Pine is trying to infiltrate Teddy's operation with the help of the reluctant Roxana (Camila Morrone), a Colombian-born, Miami-raised businesswoman functionally taking the place of Elizabeth Debicki's Jed from the first season. You don't need to remember much about Jed to watch the second season of The Night Manager, nor do you really need to remember much about what Angela or Rex had to do with bringing Roper down. It helps to remember the bond forged between Pine and Roper initially, but there's a stretch at the beginning of the sea