Two series in 2016, two paths for serial television. The first is Stranger Things.
Stranger Things debuted on Netflix in the summer of 2016. That’s a long time in human years, but even longer in TV years. The show was only the seventh non-MCU original drama the platform had produced—it was early enough that Netflix was still in experimental mode, fishing around for prestige but also a firm identity to rival the Premium Cable giants that still monopolized the conversation. With Stranger Things, more than any of the other original series of that era, Netflix seemed to find both. While technically an original concept, the show’s calling card was always its intense, nonstop, nostalgic referentiality. From its first frames, Stranger Things was a pastiche, paying homage to Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the terrifying suburban landscape of 1980s horror cinema. The show was derivative, but that was its genius.
Ten years later, Stranger Things has finally come to an end, but Netflix has been reborn in its image. Netflix knows what you like to watch, with sweeping data on your viewing habits and algorithmic anticipation of your moods, and Stranger Things’ naked appeals to the most beloved media objects of your childhood helped the streamer realize it could simply produce content that it already knows you’ll like. At the time, there was a lot of consternation about shows like Stranger Things and USA Network’s cult hit Mr. Robot being too derivative, too tethered to texts its audiences had already consumed. But Stranger Things seemingly broke the seal, its popularity normalizing this kind of creative approach, intimate emotional narrowcasting. As Aaron Bady wrote in his review of the show’s first season, “when have we last seen such a lack of anxiety when it comes to influence?” As the decade has wound on, we’ve watched the rise of an industrywide obsession with existing IP—reboots and revivals and extended universes. What Stranger Things helped Netflix understand was that the most valuable, reliable existing IP is the data you give to your favorite streaming service.
Just a few weeks after the finale of Stranger Things, another series from 2016 has shockingly come back to life. AMC co-produced the John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager 10 years ago with the BBC as part of the rising tide of limited series anchored by A-list movie stars and helmed by acclaimed film directors. HBO had scored a hit in this micro-genre two years earlier with True Detective, and the massive sensation of Big Little Lies would explode the following year. Airing in the interregnum between these two major successes, The Night Manager—starring Tom Hiddleston, face gleaming from the reflected light of Thor and the Avengers—was a clear proof of concept that this was a repeatable approach.
As planned, The Night Manager finished its limited run, releasing its stars back into the world. But, 10 years later, it’s back. Hiddleston’s star has dimmed a bit in the past decade, but this new iteration of The Night Manager—based on an original story only “inspired by” le Carré’s original novel—strangely feels more indebted to Stranger Things than to its own predecessor. Reemerging in 2026, the show is less a star vehicle or a prestige adaptation or a tribute to le Carré than it is a sometimes elegant, sometimes egregious mash-up of recent popular media phenomena, from Slow Horses to Challengers. It is content adapted from your viewing data more than anything else. Ten years later, this is The Night Manager in the Upside Down.
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, discrete, 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.
The second season—now on Amazon Prime Video rather than AMC—takes place nine years after the first. Pine has taken on a new identity and now works directly for British intelligence. Out of action, he’s got a desk job leading a ragtag group of agents called the Night Owls, who specialize in nocturnal surveillance operations. If this sounds anything like Apple TV’s recent hit spy series Slow Horses to you, that’s likely not a coincidence. While this MI6-on-the-margins drama lasts only a short time, it manages to completely reinvent Pine in a way that subverts some of what made the original Night Manager so compelling. For one, Pine is never really alone in this new season. As he infiltrates a Colombian crime organization with apparent ties to the old Roper syndicate—and possibly the British intelligence service itself!—he goes deep undercover yet again. But, this time, he’s got the support of some of his Night Owls as well as some loyal agents higher up the food chain. Pine gets caught in a number of sticky wickets throughout the new season, but rarely do we find him as completely isolated and helpless as he was in the first series. This adventure feels meaningfully less dangerous than the last.
It’s also both goofier and more professional. No longer drawing on the skills of a good hotelier, Pine now draws on—checks notes—six years of managerial experience in British intelligence. The Night Manager has gone from a series about a regular guy who must survive only on his wits and charm to one about a regular spy who’s doing spy stuff. This might seem like a quibble, but it’s part of a larger move away from the idiosyncratic specificity of the first season into a kind of generic blandness. Where le Carré’s twists came consistently by surprise, you’ll spot the twists in season two from a mile away. By the time each of the principals is introduced—Hiddleston’s Pine alongside Diego Calva’s kingpin Teddy Dos Santos and Camila Morrone’s compromised femme fatale Roxana Bolaños—their turns will be eminently guessable to any viewer who’s ever watched a spy TV show. The vistas are gorgeous, some of the performances are fun—in particular, Indira Varma as the chief of MI6—but what you’ll find is a smoothed-over caper in a sexy outfit. As the mystery unfolds, the question you’ll ask yourself most is an unanswerable one: What was John le Carré’s idea after all?
As it tunneled further and further into its own lore, Stranger Things lost a good bit of its early crackling energy. What it became is what a lot of Netflix shows ultimately became: comfort food. Beginning as a mesh of nostalgic symbols, the show itself became an object of nostalgia. When many of the show’s most devoted viewers began watching, they were the same age as its tween protagonists. Much has been made of how unnaturally old that cast looked by the end of the series, but the same is true of its audience. What kind of experience is it to be a 22-year-old watching the long-awaited series finale of a show you started watching when you were 12? Among the top-line emotions, I imagine one of them is comfort: the comfort of seeing your old friends one more time, of disappearing into a world that captivates you as an adult but helped define your adolescence.
One would not usually describe the works of John le Carré as “comfortable.” Indeed, if there’s a distinguishing feature of his oeuvre, especially those novels of his that have been adapted for the screen, it’s a pronounced sense of discomfort. His stories are potboilers of bureaucracy, compromise, devastating defeat, and Pyrrhic victory. His greatest works are thrilling but disquieting. You don’t finish Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy feeling comforted. And yet, for all its dark turns, this second season of The Night Manager is a comfortable affair. It hits all the right beats, from knotty departmental drama to basic cable erotica, but it does so without much friction or sense of fun. In 2016, The Night Manager, with its big names and auteur sensibility, prophesied a newly ambitious era of TV. In 2026, it feels a little old.
