Stream It Or Skip It?

The Night Manager, a joint production between the BBC and AMC, debuted in Feburary 2016 to excellent reviews. Now, just about a decade later, the Tom Hiddleston-starring thriller is back for a second season on the BBC and Prime Video.

Opening Shot: “FOUR YEARS LATER.” Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is in a car in Egypt; he’s there to meet Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), his former boss at the International Enforcement Agency.

The Gist:  Pine and Burr are there to ID the body of Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), who died in an Egyptian prison after Pine and Burr’s efforts got him arrested for arms dealing. When Burr goes in to see the body, she makes sure he’s actually dead.

In the present day, about a decade after Pine brought Roper down, he has a new identity — Alex Goodwin — and he’s working for MI6 running a unit called the Night Owls. It’s a surveillance unit that works the overnight shift, scanning CCTV footage of people they’ve been told to follow. At times, some members of the unit, like Sally Price-Jones (Hayley Squires), work undercover, but the work is mostly done from the Night Owls’ office, which suits Pine’s desires quite well.

The Night Owls and Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge), who helped Pine with his new identity and oversees the unit, gets praise from Mayra Cavendish (Indira Varma), the chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. He’s also one of the few who knows Pine from before he was Alex.

During a surveillence operation, Pine recognizes someone in the illegal casino they’re watching; he’s definitely someone who was in Roper’s crew back in Egypt. When he takes the information to Rex at his mentor’s 60th birthday party, Rex tells Pine that he’s Alex now, and that Roper is years in the past.

But he just can’t shake the connection, and he has his crew follow the man. They end up seeing him setting up a later meeting with Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), a Colombian arms dealer that’s described as a protégé of Roper’s.

Rex calls Pine and tells him he has information for him, but before Pine can get to him, Rex is found dead. But his old boss left clues that leads Pine to a burner phone that has two numbers on it: Pine’s and a woman named Roxana Bolaños (Camila Morrone).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Night Manager, created by David Farr, is “inspired” by the novel of the same name by John le Carré. A recent adaptation of a le Carré novel was The Little Drummer Girl.

Our Take: If you’re going to wait a decade to create a second season of a show, it’s got to do two things: It’s got to remind people who watched the first season what the connections back to that season are, and it’s got to tell a new story that’s just as compelling as the first season was. The second season of The Night Manager definitely accomplishes the first, but hasn’t yet proven that it’ll accomplish the second.

Most of the first episode is taken up with establishing what Pine’s new life is, that he still is haunted by his time undercover in Roper’s organization, and how he manages to take his Night Owls along with him to Colombia to trail both the Roper operative he spotted as well as Dos Santos. At some point, he’ll go undercover with Dos Santos’ crew, and likely get a lot of help from Roxana, an American businesswoman who trades goods in Colombia and was helping Rex flush out Dos Santos.

Burr is also going to come back in the picture, likely because her office is tracking Dos Santos, as well. But, for now, we have only gotten as far as Pine being caught in an explosion at the hotel where the Roper operative was meeting with Dos Santos. The conspiracy goes deeper than just Dos Santos, though, as we see Cavendish going to meet with the middleman that met with the person from Roper’s gang.

It’s going to be an interesting dynamic, because Pine now has to maintain two personas: He’s Alex to everyone on his team, and he’s whatever he’s going to be with Dos Santos. The only person at this point who knows him as Pine is Burr. And infiltrating Dos Santos’ organization is going to bring back all sorts of haunting memories of Roper, so that should also be an interesting dynamic. What we hope is that the lead-up to Pine really getting going with his mission isn’t as drawn out as we think it’s going to be.

Performance Worth Watching: Tom Hiddleston is still excellent as Pine, with his everyman intensity still intact.

Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: After the hotel explosion, Sally keeps getting Pine’s voice mail when she calls his phone.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Hugh Laurie, who is an executive producer of this second season, for basically signing on to play Roper’s corpse, at least in the early going.

Most Pilot-y Line: There is a scene where Pine finds Roper’s now-teenage son Danny (Noah Jupe) and tells him about his father’s death. We’re not sure where this scene connects with the rest of the narrative, but we hope it will at some point.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Night Manager comes back with a story that will eventually become as action-packed as the first season was. But until it ramps up, we’ll enjoy watching Hiddleston maintain all of his identities as he infiltrates the Dos Santos organization.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.