The New Night Manager Is Missing That Le Carré Magic

John le Carré, who died in 2020, apparently had an idea for the second season of The Night Manager. According to Simon Cornwell, le Carré’s son, after the first season’s success, the author sent a note to producers with a few ideas sketched out for where and how a sequel might emerge. Cornwell, who is himself an executive producer on the show, won’t reveal his father’s concept, but he has certainly been willing to divulge one detail: They threw it out.

The initial 2016 adaptation of The Night Manager was already a dramatic departure from its source text. The new series brought the novel from its 1990s setting into the present, changed some significant locations, traded out Colombian drug lords for Middle Eastern warlords as the big bads, and gender-swapped a main character, but otherwise executed and enlivened le Carré’s outline in a way the author himself publicly lauded. The Night Manager’s first season told the story of Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston), a British army veteran working as the night manager of a ritzy hotel in Cairo at the height of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s. Pine is diligent, discreet, and devoted to his service work at the hotel. It’s this fastidiousness, as well as his ability to serve as a kind of handsome cipher—a symbol of Western elegance and convenience to late-arriving guests—more than his military past that make him suited to the kind of espionage he soon finds himself swept up in.

His lover is murdered at the hotel, but only after passing along paperwork that proves billionaire philanthropist Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) to be an international arms smuggler. Roper gets away with it, despite Pine’s efforts to involve the British Foreign Office. To deal with his grief, Pine leaves Africa for Switzerland, where, four years later, he runs into Roper again. Working with Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), his contact in the Foreign Office, Pine goes undercover to infiltrate Roper’s family and his organization. He becomes a mentee to Roper and secret lover to Roper’s wife, calmly walking a tightrope but ultimately bringing Roper down.