The Night Manager’ – a third series?

It has just been announced that there will be a third series of The Night Manager , the Sunday night BBC1 drama which has been absurdly hyped by the BBC. The first two series could not have been more different. The first was based on the 1993 novel  by  John le Carré  and adapted by  David Farr .

Le Carré needs no introduction. Over sixty years he wrote almost thirty books but is probably still best known for his early Cold War spy thrillers, including his breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) and most famously, the Smiley trilogy (1974-79), two of which were adapted by the BBC with Alec Guinness as George Smiley.

Le Carré’s spy thrillers could not have been more timely. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold , later filmed with Richard Burton, appeared in 1963, two years after the Berlin Wall was built, and one year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. These were two of the highpoints of the Cold War.

Then there was the British fascination with spies from the 1950s until the 1980s. Donald Maclean  and  Guy Burgess both fled to  Moscow  in May 1951 and Kim Philby defected to Moscow after finally being unmasked as a Soviet agent in 1963. Then in 1979, Sir Anthony Blunt was exposed as another Soviet spy.

Le Carré’s early spy thrillers caught the mood of Britain during the Cold War. It wasn’t just about the Soviet Union, but the strange posh men, many of them homosexual, educated at public school and Cambridge, who in EM Forster’s famous phrase, “if asked to choose between betraying his friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the guts to betray his country” . In addition to Le Carré’s hugely popular novels, there were also famous TV dramas by Alan Bennett ( An Englishman Abroad , A Question of Attribution ) and novels by Graham Greene, Len Deighton and Mick Herron.

Le Carré was quick to move on to more exotic locations in the post-colonial world: the Middle East ( The Little Drummer Girl , 1983), Cairo and Colombia ( The Night Manager , 1993), Central America ( The Tailor of Panama, 1996) and Kenya ( The Constant Gardener , 2001). Though these novels were all turned into films or TV series, and sold well, they never had the cultural impact of the Cold War novels. Part of the reason is that though Le Carré knew something about Cold War Germany and the Soviet Union, he doesn’t seem to have known much about the post-Cold War world and his later novels never really connected with it.

This brings us to The Night Manager . The first series was a great success, largely thanks to the terrific performances by an all-star cast, including Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Tom Hollander and David Harewood. Then there is the screenplay by David Farr, a distinguished theatre director, playwright and screenwriter, who made his name working on series 4-9 of the BBC MI5 thriller, Spooks (2006-10),   The Night Manager (2016 and 2025-6) and McMafia (2018). The series received huge critical acclaim and won numerous awards, including two Emmys, three RTS awards, three BAFTAs and three Golden Globe Awards.  

But then came the second — calamitous — series of The Night Manager, which had more executive producers than sense. Crucially, it is not based on Le Carré’s novel and it is unlikely that he would have had anything to do with this sequel. Just as seriously, Hollander’s character was killed off in Series 1, there was no David Harewood and at first it seemed as if Hugh Laurie’s superb villain had also been disposed of. And, strangely, all those executive producers and co-producers failed to introduce a single fascinating new character, location or story-line.

Even more strange, the BBC refused to acknowledge that it now had a turkey on its hands and seems to have commissioned a third series. More predictably, our current woeful generation of TV critics thinks Series 2 is fine. The Independent wrote, “ The Night Manager pulls off the, increasingly rare, trick of knowing its audience, understanding its success, and replicating the formula.”

So all eyes are on the third part of the trilogy. Will someone involved get a grip and turn this wreck around? Or better still, will someone find the money to hire Tomas Alfredson — the brilliant director of the 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman as Smiley — to direct Series Three?

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