Heading into its release, nobody really expected much more from The Night Agent other than a decent performance on Netflix, which was always going to be par for the course given that it was an action-packed spy thriller that promised plenty of bang for its buck.
Taking the entire world by storm certainly wasn’t on the bingo card, though, with the latest series from The Shield and S.W.A.T. head honcho Shawn Ryan exploding out of the blocks to end up as the streaming service’s seventh most-watched original series of all-time. As you’d expect, a rapid-fire renewal was handed out just six days later, but progress has been slow since then.
Of course, the writers’ and actors’ strikes have slowed things down significantly, but as Ryan revealed to Variety, he was thrilled to get the ball rolling again and finally start putting the pieces into place for The Night Agent to begin concocting its hotly-anticipated comeback.
“It’s a remarkable underdog story. Just from the publicly available metrics we can see that after 10 weeks, the show had over 750 million hours of viewing that was global. Considering that this was not a huge-budget show and it had no real names and not a lot of marketing, and it’s still going to be one of the most-watched new shows of 2023. They knew I could come in when the strike was all over and blow it all up.
I’d like to think that [the pandemic] didn’t ultimately affect the quality of Season 1 but it certainly affected the process. It was hard to get to the quality level that we wanted to be at. You can get burned out on a computer screen pretty quickly. So we were limiting ourselves to maybe five and a half hours a day of actually working whereas when you’re in the room, it doesn’t feel as wearing on you. Just seeing how much we accomplished in the first few days, I can tell it’s a big difference than doing the Zoom thing.”
Ending on a cliffhanger – as far too many Netflix exclusives are wont to do based on the ratio that get canceled – sets the stage nicely for even more intrigue and espionage, but it could be a long time until The Night Agent returns with on-camera talents still manning the picket lines.
