SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from “Buyer’s Remorse,” the Season 2 finale of “The Night Agent,” now streaming on Netflix.
In its final moments, Season 2 of “The Night Agent” elegantly set up a Season 3.
Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), the off-books government agent of the show’s title has received a new mission. Given that Jacob Monroe (Louis Herthum), an information broker whose tactical leak of information swung the presidential election, believes that Peter is in his thrall, Peter will play the part, and in so doing gather information about Louis to bring back to the government. “He still believes he owns you,” Peter’s supervisor, Catherine (Amanda Warren), tells him. “So we’re going to let him.”
“We wanted Season 2 to feel satisfying,” series creator Shawn Ryan says. “We didn’t want to end on a complete cliffhanger. There are consequences that serve as a launching pad into Season 3.”
That third season is filming now; Basso says that, based on its scripts, “it’s my favorite season.” Among the questions it asks, he says, are “How can you have objective morals in a subjective environment? It’s tough to do this in the name of good, when the good is subjective.”
Throughout the season, Peter has had to sift through conflicting pieces of information; he’s also responsible for spreading a bit of misinformation, in a crucial scene in Episode 5 in which he lies to Noor (Arienne Mandi) about the safety of her brother in order to keep her trust. (“That is really subtle, wonderful acting that if we asked [Basso] to do in Season 1, he could have, but we knew in Season 2 he could,” Ryan says.)
An image of a man standing solo and looking sweaty is displayed. The man is depicted on a backdrop that is mostly greyish. The image showcases the character Peter from the TV show “The Night Agent”.
Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
This moral complication was welcome for Basso. “The path is very clear in Season 1 — stopping the president being murdered. Those are easy decisions. Season 2, the objectives might be similar, but the path is less clear, and that’s when he starts to deviate, hit dead ends, and justify things.”
“One of our Iranian actors talked about how they felt,” Ryan says. “Some of the appeal of the show was — there’s so much confusion in the world, and so many confusing things to sort through. There’s so much distrust of the people who have influence over our lives. A character like Peter, who’s working hard to get at a verifiable truth, is really appealing.”
With that said, Peter’s quest for truth is likely to exact a psychic toll. “He foiled this attack on the United Nations and the hotel that was housing a lot of delegates,” Ryan says, “but his actions to stop that attack involved taking information from the U.N. and handing it over [to Monroe]. That information having the unintended consequence of swaying the presidential election is going to weigh incredibly heavily on Peter’s shoulders.”
The show’s first season was a global phenomenon for Netflix, and its second may well match it in success. How long might “The Night Agent” run? “I think there are a lot of really, really great streaming shows whose ideas feel a bit more like movie ideas, and whose shelf life, as a result, can’t be that long,” Ryan says. “It’s an even more popular show than ours, but it doesn’t surprise me that Season 3 of ‘Squid Game’ will be the final season, right? As amazing a concept and execution as it is, that doesn’t feel like a show that’s built to be long-lasting.”
By contrast, Ryan notes, “We’re essentially creating a new world and a new set of problems and a whole new set of characters each season, and introducing Peter into that world.” The only limiting factor may be Basso’s willingness to continue with the series — he discussed his ambivalence about his acting career and desire to walk away in a Variety profile — but Ryan is optimistic. “In the DNA of this show, it has the ability to run for as long as Netflix, Sony, and I want, and for Gabriel to be involved as long as he wants to be involved.”
