When I first began reviewing television after years of doing film, I was struck by one huge difference between the way they tell stories. Movies work hard to end memorably: They want to stick the landing so we'll leave the theater satisfied. TV series have no landing to stick. They want to leave us un-satisfied so we'll tune into the next season.
Oddly enough, this week sees the arrival of sequels to two hit series — Apple TV's Hijack and Prime Video's The Night Manager — whose first seasons ended so definitively that I never dreamt there could be another. Goes to show how naïve I am.
The original Hijack, which came out in 2023, starred Idris Elba as Sam Nelson, a corporate negotiator who's flying to see his ex when the plane is skyjacked by assorted baddies. The story was dopey good fun, with Elba — who's nobody's idea of an inconspicuous man — somehow able to move around a packed jetliner and thwart the hijackers. The show literally stuck the landing.
It was hard to see how you could bring back Sam for a second go. I mean, if a man's hijacked once, that's happenstance. If it happens twice, well, you're not going on vacation with a guy like that. Still, Season 2 manages to make Sam's second hijacking at least vaguely plausible by tying it to the first one. This time out Sam's on a crowded Berlin subway train whose hijackers will slaughter everyone if their demands aren't met.
From here, things follow the original formula. You've got your grab bag of fellow passengers, Sam's endangered ex-wife, some untrustworthy bureaucrats, an empathetic woman traffic controller, and so forth. You've got your non-stop twists and episode-ending cliffhangers. And of course, you've got Elba, a charismatic actor who may be better here than in the original because this plot unleashes his capacity for going to dark, dangerous places.
While more ornately plotted than the original, the show still isn't about anything more than unleashing adrenaline. I happily watched it for Elba and the shots of snow falling in Berlin. But for a show like this to be thrilling, it has to be as swift as a greyhound. At a drawn-out eight episodes — four hours more than movies like Die Hard and Speed — Hijack 2 is closer to a well-fed basset hound.
Things move much faster in Season 2 of The Night Manager. The action starts nearly a decade after the 2016 original which starred Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a night manager at a luxury Swiss hotel, who gets enlisted by a British intelligence agent — that's Olivia Colman — to take down the posh arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie. Equal parts James Bond and John le Carré, who wrote the source novel, the show raced among glossy locations and built to a pleasing conclusion.
So pleasing that Hiddleston is back as Pine, who is now doing surveillance work for MI6 under the name of Alex Goodwin. He learns the existence of Teddy Dos Santos — that's Diego Calva — a Colombian pretty boy who's the arms-dealing protégé of Roper. So naturally, Pine defies orders and goes after him, heading to Colombia disguised as a rich, dodgy banker able to fund Teddy's business.
While David Farr's script doesn't equal le Carré in sophistication, this labyrinthine six-episode sequel follows the master's template. It's positively bursting with stuff — private eyes and private armies, splashy location shooting in Medellín and Cartagena, jaded lords and honest Colombian judges, homoerotic kisses, duplicities within duplicities, a return from the dead, plus crackerjack performances by Hiddleston, Laurie, Colman, Calva and Hayley Squires as Pine's sidekick in Colombia. Naturally, there's a glamorous woman, played by Camila Morrone, who Pine will want to rescue.
As it builds to a teasing climax — yes, there will be a Season 3 — The Night Manager serves up a slew of classic le Carré themes. This is a show about fathers and sons, the corrupt British ruling class, resurgent nationalism and neo-imperialism. Driving the action is what one character dubs "the commercialization of chaos," in which the powerful smash a society in order to buy up — and profit from — the pieces. If it had come out a year ago, Season 2 might've seemed like just another far-fetched thriller set in an exotic location. These days it feels closer to a news flash.
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