When writers are in the position to write a sequel, they’re often faced with a dilemma. How do you continue a story that was successful enough to warrant a sequel? To give the story a new narrative engine, you probably have to change a few things. In a genre story, you might need to create a new villain and mystery surrounding them for your hero to confront (the format of every successive James Bond film). But at the same time, you’re also mandated with meeting the expectations of retaining the elements that made a story “successful.” You have to reproduce the feeling, themes, and elements of the first story, while delivering a story that is new enough to surprise and satisfy.
This is an almost impossible task. Season 2 of The Wire (2003) famously shifted the focus of the plot from the Baltimore task force stinging the Barksdale drug-dealing organization to a mystery about human trafficking on the Baltimore docks, sidelining many of the series’ established characters for an entire season. This season was polarizing—on the one hand, it demonstrated narrative courage and inventiveness for trying to reinvent the show so broadly while retaining its investigative DNA. On the other, it had drifted far from what the show was sold as—a flailing police force tries a last-ditch task force as a salve on the war on drugs.
In hindsight, The Wire’s second season may go down as one of the most successful, critically speaking, attempts at a sequel. Because then we have shows that try to have it both ways—try to reinvent the show but slavishly reproduce the dynamics of the original series. And here we have to discuss the second season of The Night Manager.
John Le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager is one of his last truly great novels, in which he managed to shift his espionage fiction into the disorienting world that emerged after the Cold War. The titular hotel employee, Jonathan Pine, is radicalized after he helps a whistleblower fax some sensitive documents at his hotel, leading to the woman’s murder. At fault is a nefarious arms dealer named Richard Roper.
MI6 operative Leonard Burr persuades Pine to join the agency and go undercover to expose Roper, leading to a quest in which Pine infiltrates Roper’s inner circle, falls for Roper’s mistress, and becomes something of a surrogate son to Roper himself. But Roper will not be defeated so easily, as it turns out he’s working for a rival faction of MI6 that Burr must confront.
The original Prime series that adapted the novel (2016) casted Tom Hiddleston as Pine, Hugh Laurie as Roper, and Olivia Colman as a gender-flipped Angela Burr, and delivered a unenviable product—it was a faithful adaptation that also updated the setting to be more current (swapping Curaçao/Colombia for Turkey/Syria) and improved upon the original novel’s convoluted, inconclusive ending, so much so that even Le Carré praised the adaptation.
But after that, with The Night Manager a hit for Prime, and with the original source material exhausted, came the inevitable dilemma: if this were to continue, how would you go about it? Start anew, or reboot the old? (Spoilers below).
