The Night Agent season two: The perfect encapsulation of Netflix’s generic mid-TV era

It’s been almost two years since The Night Agent’s first season stormed the Netflix charts, so it was helpful that it started its return with a recap clip.

As the scenes flash through, you might be reacting, “Wait, what, there was a plot to bomb Camp David? Those two characters that I can’t remember the names of actually hooked up? Why isn’t any of this familiar?!”

For a show that was the most watched English-language original on Netflix in 2023, it was so unmemorable. It’s set-and-forget viewing.

Netflix has a whole thing about gourmet cheeseburgers, which is what its content head Bela Bejara described as her commissioning goal. If you think about gourmet cheeseburgers, they’re broadly appealing and low nutrition but slightly elevated, so fans can think themselves bougier than the Maccas brigade.

Netflix is rarely going for the loftier ambitions of commercial art anymore. It’s just commercial. Pack them in, trap them with a cliffhanger at the end and push them onto the next episode so quickly there’s no time to reach for the remote to press “back” or “pause”.

It doesn’t matter if you’re paying attention, as long as it’s playing ambiently, and you see the value in stumping up a subscription fee for white noise to accompany your doom scrolling.

The Night Agent is the perfect encapsulation of Netflix’s mid-TV era. Although the new season features quite a few scenes in Farsi, so you’ll actually have tear away from your phone sometimes.

It’s slickly produced, works in the moment when you’re watching, if you’re watching, but quickly flits out of your memory bank, especially if you binged it over two or three nights like cramming for an exam.

This is a shame because this second season is actually tightly plotted, especially if you like a spy thriller with lots of twists and turns. Most of them even make sense.

But it never escapes the feeling that this is insignificant TV, expendable and lightweight. Something you might like, but you will never love.

If you don’t remember, and we’re betting you don’t, the series is about a junior FBI agent named Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso). His father was also a government agent but betrayed his country so Peter Jr has a chip on his shoulder but transcending that tainted family legacy.

Some stuff happened in that first season – you don’t really need to remember – but the crux of it is he’s now a bona fide agent in the secret Night Action unit. In the opening scenes of this series, Peter is part of an operation that goes wrong and his partner is killed.

He doesn’t trust anyone so he goes AWOL while trying to track down an American operative who sold secrets to bad guys. Rose (Luciane Buchanan), hacker and love interest, is pulled into the plot with a phone call that is clearly a trap.

The two reunite and try to stop a scheme involving a potential chemical attack, a dictator of an unnamed eastern European/Balkan territory and his pampered British-educated son, and a clandestine trader in intelligence and his goons.

There’s also Noor (Ariennne Mandi), a young woman working in the Iranian mission who is leaking information to the Americans in exchange for asylum for herself and her family.

It’s all pretty compelling TV and effectively uses a lot of genre tropes that we’ve seen before in the likes of Homeland and The Americans.

But what makes those two shows miles above The Night Agent is that they built stories around their characters and not the other way around. Peter and Rose are generic cut-outs who are merely functionaries of the plot.

It’s like they’re human MacGuffins, designed to move things along so the story can go from A to B to C with efficiency and nothing messy like complex human emotions.

It’s not the fault of either Basso or Buchanan but the characters are so thin either or both actors could’ve been swapped out for others and you may not even notice. They also don’t have a ton of chemistry.

That’s why you’ll never love The Night Agent — we don’t love plot beats, we love characters.

It all feels very gourmet cheeseburger. Samey. Scoff it down, move on, next! And next and next and next.

Welcome to Netflix 3.0, the home of mid-TV.

The Night Agent is on Netflix