[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Season 2 of The Night Agent.]

Summary

In the Netflix series ‘The Night Agent,’ Peter Sutherland faces increasing paranoia and stress due to the challenges of being a Night Agent.

Season 3 will explore the consequences of Peter’s actions in Season 2 and feature new dynamics and characters.

The series focuses on Peter’s moral struggles, relationship dynamics, and character growth in the face of danger.

From creator Shawn Ryan, the second season of the Netflix series The Night Agent continues to follow Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), who is now a full-fledged agent for the secretive organization where every mission is full of danger and life-or-death stakes. After a covert mission has fatal consequences, Peter’s superior Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren) questions just how much he can be trusted, as he and Rose (Luciane Buchanan) work together again to stop a threat. But unraveling the threads of a looming terrorist plot is made even more challenging when you have to be suspicious of everyone.
With everything he’s learned about his father, survived over the course of Season 1, and uncovered in Season 2, Peter should probably be in therapy before taking on another mission. And that fact is not something that escapes Ryan, who’s actually part of a committee that’s working to improv the portrayals of mental health on TV. During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Ryan talked about how Peter’s paranoia and stress might increase if he doesn’t get the kind of help he should be getting, as well as how they approached the therapist scenes with Rose. He also discussed how the ripple effects of Season 2 will affect Season 3, which has already been in production, seeing some familiar faces return, understanding the audience’s investment in Peter and Rose’s relationship, the dynamic with Catherine, and just how much Peter has evolved since the first season.
Peter Sutherland Has Created Ripple Effects That Will Come to Fruition in Season 3 of ‘The Night Agent’

Collider: Congrats on the Season 3 pick-up! What are you most excited about with Season 3 and where you’re taking the show next?
SHAWN RYAN: One of the things I’ve learned in the many years I’ve been doing this is that sometimes I don’t really, at a deep gut level, understand what we were writing about in a season until the season’s over. And so, in many ways, I’m just now figuring out what Season 2 means to me. We’re at the beginning of filming and we still aren’t done writing Season 3, so I’m not even sure that I can properly articulate what Season 3 will mean. At the center of it is Peter Sutherland and the evolution of his character from a low-level guy manning a phone that rarely rang in the windowless room in the basement of the White House to a guy who gets thrust into these extraordinary circumstances, which is an age-old Hollywood tradition.
I think of Hitchcock films that oftentimes dealt with the average man thrown into extraordinary circumstances. In Season 2, he takes on a greater role as a Night Agent, but he’s still figuring it out, still making mistakes, having to make tough decisions, having to make moral compromises that he didn’t have to make before that pain him, in many ways, to have to make. Season 3, as we get more into it, will deal with the consequences of the actions that he in Season 2. He ends up being a big part of the reason why the day is saved in Season 2, but in doing so, he’s created these ripple effects that are gonna come to fruition in Season 3 and that he’s gonna have to try to make up for.
By the end of the season, we do get some resolution to certain aspects of Season 2, but clearly there are parts of the story that will carry over and there are characters that will carry over. How are you feeling about the dynamics of the new cast you’re bringing in and blending with the cast that’s already there, and how all of that will affect Peter?
RYAN: We love putting Peter into new situations and new worlds and having him deal with new characters. In many ways, Peter is our anchor, and then we change a lot of things around him. When we were breaking Season 2, we realized that we weren’t quite ready to resolve some things. We did want the season to feel complete and to feel satisfying, and I think it does, but it also platforms and sets up these new story possibilities in Season 3. There’s less of a cliffhanger and more of a tease that we’re going to go off in this direction. As Peter, the character, evolves, we think a lot about his convictions, a lot about his soul, and a lot about his inherent goodness. The question that arises is, can you work in this business that is built so much around deception and still maintain your moral core?
We see moments of doubt in Season 2 with that, and that’s why somebody like Rose is really important. She’s a reminder to him and she actually tells him not to lose the real Peter in all this, but that’s gonna become increasingly more and more difficult. When you choose to put yourself into the world of vipers and liars and killers, and you have to do things like he does at the end of episode five, when he lies to Noor and tells her that her family is safe, so that hopefully she feels comfortable handing over the photographs. That’s really tough for Peter, and that’s probably the moment that makes him sick to his stomach to have told that. So, I don’t know that I’ve completely figured it out, as far as what this is all gonna mean when we’re done with it. But my instinct in the moment is that we really love who Peter is and was, as a person, in Season 1. Can he maintain those great qualities, even as his job makes it tougher and tougher for him to morally be the person he wants to be?

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The dynamic between Peter and Catherine this season is so interesting. It’s fun to watch them together because you don’t know how things are going to turn out with them, since they don’t know whether they can trust each other. What were you hoping for with that dynamic, and how did what it turned into compare to that, once you saw what Gabriel Basso and Amanda Warren brought to it?
RYAN: They’re so good together. What I love about making TV that is separate from movies is that if Season 2 just existed in condensed form as one movie, I don’t think the Peter-Catherine relationship would be quite as interesting as it is, knowing that in Season 1, Peter’s mentor and boss Diane Farr, betrayed him and tried to have him and Rose killed. You take everything that happened in Season 1 and you take the audiences expectations from Season 1, and you’re able to craft a story where Peter doesn’t know if he can trust Catherine. Is it because of the events in Bangkok, or is it because he’s paranoid from having been burned before? The audience will trust Peter and his instincts, so whatever way Peter goes, the audience will have the tendency to follow. This journey that Peter has to go on, with the help of Rose, once again, when they both have PTSD from the events of Season 1, she’s handling it in a healthy way by talking to a therapist, and he’s handling it in an unhealthy way by trying to ignore it and push through it. That’s gonna lead to distrust and paranoia. A lot of his journey is trying to find that Peter in him that used to trust people.
That’s why the moment between Peter and Catherine, when he says to her, “Shoot me or get out of my way,” is so interesting. Do you feel like he’s gotten to a place where he’s learned to trust himself and his instincts, even if it gets him in trouble or blows up in his face?
RYAN: Yeah. When you’ve had success doing that before, as he did in Season 1, when he essentially took the president hostage in front of Secret Service people because he knew that was the only way to save her, and that worked. So, you’re gonna have some more confidence to say, “Hey, on paper, this might not be the right thing, but in the real, messy, dirty world, it’s the only somewhat right thing to do and I have the moral clarity that I need to do it.” These are progressions, and that’s what I think TV viewers like about episodic, long-running TV. They can see that the characters are changing. They can see that the actions and repercussions from previous episodes and previous seasons have had an effect. That’s where TV can be richer than film, in the same way that a novel can be richer than a short story. Not that films or short stories aren’t great, but an advantage to this form of TV is that you can explore these things in deeper ways over longer periods of time.

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Basso also talks about the changing dynamic with Rose and how much Peter is willing to put her at risk just to be with her.

The first episode starts off in a way that lets us know that things are going to be pretty challenging for Peter, for the rest of the season. He’s on this mission with Alice, and then she ends up dead. Do you feel like that really makes things real for him?
RYAN: Yeah. In some ways, the Peter at the end of Season 1 was maybe a little naïve about what being a Night Agent would be. So much of his self-worth, and sometimes his lack of self-worth, is tied up in his father’s past and his desire to escape his father’s shadow and his attempts to make up for his father’s moral failings. And so, he went into that job knowing that intellectually there were dangers, but there’s a difference between knowing that it’s possible things could go badly and seeing your mentor and partner killed right in front of you, and then being forced to run for your own life. That’s a tremendously scarring thing. Peter’s not getting the mental health help he probably needs in that moment, the way that Rose has sought out help for her mental health. That’s an important subject to me. I’m actually part of a committee that’s talking about improving the portrayals of mental health on TV and we actually consulted a lot of people who are part of the organization when we were researching how to do these therapist scenes with Rose and how Peter’s paranoia and stress might increase when he’s not getting the kind of help he probably should be getting.
About All the Night Shoots, Showrunner Shawn Ryan Says, “We’re Not Making ‘The Day Agent,’ We’re Making ‘The Night Agent'”

Image via Netflix

It’s a really interesting character arc for Peter because he’s definitely grown and in a different place in Season 2.
RYAN: I’m really proud of the work we did. It’s a collaborative effort. I’ve got this amazing team around me of writers, directors, producers, actors and crew. It’s not the easiest show to make. There are a lot of late-night shoots. The joke on the set is, “We’re not making The Day Agent. We’re making The Night Agent. So, we have to shoot all night in the cold.” So, it’s a difficult show to make. We’re on location far more than we’re on stages. It can be easy to forget when you’re in the middle of February on Staten Island in 30-degree rainy weather and it’s miserable, but we’re so excited that the show is out and people can see the fruits of all the labor that everyone put in. We’re trying to keep the show fresh and we don’t want to repeat ourselves, so Season 2 is different than Season 1, hopefully in a way that’s enjoyable to the people that loved Season 1.

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The series is streaming now on Netflix.

One of the things that I loved about Season 1 was the romance between Peter and Rose, and it does feel like there’s less of their love story this season. Was that more because you really couldn’t ignore the tension that would come from the fact that he is a Night Agent now and that is going to affect her much more?
RYAN: I’ll answer that question in two parts. One, I’ll talk about Season 1, which is that I think one of the failings of this genre in the film world is that people oftentimes get thrown into romances too quickly. With a great movie like Three Days of the Condor, if there’s one aspect that I would quibble with, it’s that the relationship between Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway doesn’t really feel grounded and realistic. In this two-hour film, it’s shoehorned in because there’s an expectation that we’ve got one of the sexiest man alive and one of the sexiest women alive, and so we have to get them together. But the story never really supported that. With Season 1, we didn’t know whether Peter and Rose would ever get together, as we started writing it. What I said is, “They will only get together if we get to the place where I feel like we’ve really earned it,” and we ultimately did. But that romance could never take precedence over what they were doing within the moment. If you look at Season 1, it happened when they were hiding out in this boat and there was nothing else really to do in that moment. But once they left that boat and had things to do, the romance took a backseat. It’s shown in flashbacks and other things that they had this month between the end of that and when he took off to start his work as a Night Agent. So, that’s the first half of the question. That’s what we were going for in Season 1.
With Season 2, they have this incredibly strong connection. The scene with her therapist, when the therapist talks about, “How long have you really known this guy? It’s obviously you have a deep connection, but sometimes these connections built on these intense situations can be a little deceiving.” That’s the reality. They’ve never really had much time in their lives to just be themselves together in a relationship. In the time that we’re showing on camera, they’re involved in these life-or-death situations, and they’re involved in these high-stakes things, and it felt unrealistic to us, as writers, to try to shoehorn and jam that in. What was always important to me was that we, as an audience, understand the intense affection and loyalty they have for each other. There is a kiss that happens in episode four of Season 2. There’s an implication, as he stumbles in bed with her after her nightmares, that there is a physical side, but I’m not sure that that’s the important part of our storytelling. The emotional connection is the important part. The pawing each other and kissing each other all over isn’t the important part of that. So, I think we can imply that some of that happened along the way, but what’s much more important to me is that is that the audience understands just how much Peter cares about her, how much she cares about him, and the sacrifices that they’re willing to make to save and help each other.
‘The Night Agent’ Showrunner Shawn Ryan Knows How Invested the Audience Is in Peter and Rose’s Relationship

Image via Netflix

Will we continue to see that relationship in Season 3?
RYAN: I’m not prepared to talk about Season 3 too much yet because we’re still writing it. We’ve written a lot of it, but we’ve not written all of it. Just last week, we were working and going backwards and rewriting some things, so I don’t wanna talk too much about Season 3, especially as we hope people watch Season 2 first. But we’ll see what happens on that front. The format for the show is a little different from other shows. It’s not the same core cast every season. Somebody like Chelsea (Fola Evans-Akingbola), who is so important in Season 1, wasn’t in Season 2 until the very last bit in the final episode. I don’t think it’s too much to say that we’re platforming her to be a part of Season 3. So, I understand the audience’s investment in Peter and Rose, and we spent a lot of time talking about where that’s going and what it means, but I don’t know yet how that will also resolve itself or how quickly it will resolve. We’ll have to see. Sorry to be so cagey. I don’t wanna promise something that then changes along the way

The Night Agent

Release Date

March 23, 2023

Network

Netflix

Directors

Adam Arkin, Guy Ferland, Millicent Shelton, Ramaa Mosley

Writers

Seth Fisher, Munis Rashid, Corey Deshon

Cast

Hiro Kanagawa

FBI Director Willett

Rebecca Staab

Cynthia Hawkins

The Night Agent is available to stream on Netflix. Check out the Season 2 trailer: