Heroes aren’t born. They answer the call. From The Executive Producer of The Shield & S.W.A.T. comes The Night Agent series on Netflix. It premiered on March 23, 2023.
Gabriel Basso plays a young FBI agent whose dead-end assignment connects him to a deadly conspiracy in Shawn Ryan’s adaptation of the novel by Matthew Quirk.
Based on: The Night Agent; by Matthew Quirk
Created by: Shawn Ryan
Genre: Action; Conspiracy thriller; Drama
Original network: Netflix
Original release: March 23, 2023
Producers: James Dodson; Nick Bradley
Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland
Luciane Buchanan as Rose Larkin
Eve Harlow as Ellen
Sarah Desjardins as Maddie Redfield
Hong Chau as Diane Farr
Fola Evans-Akingbola as Chelsea Arrington
D.B. Woodside as Erik Monks
Phoenix Raei as Dale
Shawn Ryan’s adaptation of Matthew Quirk’s novel The Night Agent still feels like the Amazon Jack Preacher series and blends many of the same elements of patriotism and revenge. Generally, The Night Agent is well-paced, reasonably entertaining and features an effective central turn from Gabriel Basso. Maybe it feels a little thin when it comes to its main mystery and political world-building, but it sets itself up comfortably for an ongoing series after this 10-episode introduction.
Basso stars as Peter Sutherland, a fledgling FBI agent who stops a major Metro bombing in the taut opening scene.
One year later, Peter is working a secretive and entirely dead-end job in a windowless office of the White House, stationed in front of a mysterious phone that never rings. Until it does. At the other end of the phone is Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan), a disgraced former cybersecurity CEO who got the number for the highly secure phone from her aunt and uncle before they were murdered by a pair of vicious assassins (Phoenix Raei and a nicely wild-eyed Eve Harlow). Rose is shocked to find out that her aunt and uncle were spies, and she’s concerned by a conversation she overheard about both an upcoming terrorist attack and a mole in the White House.
Peter believes Rose and Diane Farr (Hong Chau), the president’s chief of staff, believes Peter, but Peter’s FBI boss (Robert Patrick) isn’t so sure. Oh and yes, this may remind you of Netflix’s CIA-centric The Recruit, a more dishy and ridiculous (for better and worse) take on the spy thriller.
We meet Chelsea Arrington (Fola Evans-Akingbola), a Secret Service agent assigned to the only gig more menial than Peter’s closet duty: protecting the vice president’s daughter, Maddie (Sarah Desjardins, having a big weekend with this and the return of Yellowjackets). Chelsea is assigned a new partner in D.B. Woodside’s Erik Monks, returning to the job years after taking a bullet for a previous president. His experience will come in handy when — try not to be shocked here — the storyline about the vice president’s daughter intersects with Peter’s case.
Soon, everybody is on the run, everybody is being looked at as a potential suspect in some scandalous stuff, and potential traitors and other red herrings are popping out of the woodwork at a rate of one or two per episode. The body count rises as an explosive finale nears.
The Night Agent pilot, written by Ryan and directed by Seth Gordon, has an exciting opening and wastes very little time in establishing Peter’s dead-end position and then the danger facing Rose. But the opening episodes are inconsistent, at least partially by design.
