2016 - Present
The Night Manager aired on BBC One on 21 February 2016 and on AMC in the United States on 19 April 2016. Six episodes. One director across the whole run, which is unusual for a prestige limited series and ends up mattering enormously. It is an adaptation of the 1993 John le Carré novel, shepherded to television by the author's own production company, The Ink Factory, run by his sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell. David Farr handled the scripts and updated le Carré's post-Cold-War setting into the post-Arab-Spring world of the 2010s. The core story survives intact.
Tom Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier working the front desk of a luxury hotel in Zermatt. A ghost from his Cairo days walks back into his life. Angela Burr, an intelligence officer played by Olivia Colman, recruits him to get close to Richard Roper, an English philanthropist and arms dealer whom Burr flatly describes as the worst man in the world. Pine agrees. From that point the show is a slow-burn long-con across Mallorca, Marrakech, London and Devon, watching one man try to lie his way into another man's family while keeping the knife hidden.
The series collected Golden Globes for Hiddleston, Laurie and Colman, plus Emmy wins for Colman, Bier and the production. A long-delayed second season was confirmed for 2025.
Hiddleston does the hardest thing an actor can do in a spy story. He plays a man who is almost always lying, and makes every lie feel like a different fully furnished person. Pine is charming with Roper, cold with Burr, tender with Jed, murderous behind closed doors. There is a stillness to the performance that makes you lean in.
Hugh Laurie plays Richard Roper, and this is the role that reintroduced him to audiences who had filed him away as Dr House. Roper is funny, warm, attentive to his staff and his lover, generous with his friends. He is also arranging the sale of weapons that will be used to kill children. Laurie plays the two halves as the same man, which is the frightening part. He took home a Golden Globe for it and it felt earned.
Olivia Colman plays Angela Burr, a role le Carré wrote as a man and Farr gender-flipped for the adaptation. Colman was pregnant during filming and the production wrote the pregnancy into the character rather than hiding it, which gives Burr a quiet physical weight that the role did not have on the page. This is Colman in her bridge era between Broadchurch and her later prestige work, already doing the thing she does where she makes moral certainty feel unglamorous and exhausting.
The supporting bench is excellent:
Tom Hollander
Major Lance "Corky" Corkoran
Susanne Bier
Director (all 6 episodes)
Alistair Petrie
Sandy Langbourne
Elizabeth Debicki
Jed Marshall
David Harewood
Joel Steadman
Tom Hiddleston
Jonathan Pine
Douglas Hodge
Rex Mayhew
Katherine Kelly
Caroline Langbourne
Susanne Bier directed all six episodes, which is the single choice that separates The Night Manager from most limited series of its generation. Prestige TV in 2016 almost always split its episodes between three or four directors for scheduling reasons. Bier refused. The result is a show that looks and breathes like one six-hour film. Colour temperature, camera grammar, pace, even the way scenes exit. All of it is consistent in a way that broader shows cannot manage.
She shoots wealth honestly. The yachts, the villa in Mallorca, the hotel suites in Cairo and Zermatt, the private plane interiors, the Marrakech riad. None of it is ironised. Bier lets you see why someone might want this life. That is the point. Pine has to want it too, or the con collapses.
Bier won the Emmy for directing a limited series and became the first woman to win a DGA award for television in the same year. Neither is a consolation prize. Watch the show and the case is obvious.
The score by Victor Reyes does a lot of quiet work, tense and stringy when it needs to be, almost lullaby-soft when Roper is pretending to be a family man. The title sequence, all dissolving weapon schematics inside luxury objects, is one of the better title sequences of the decade.
Le Carré spent his career writing about the rot inside institutions that claim to protect us. The Night Manager is late le Carré, which means the villain is not a foreign intelligence service. It is a British businessman with a charity foundation and a number in every foreign ministry. The intelligence agencies charged with stopping him are compromised by their own people. Burr is not fighting Roper alone. She is fighting her own side at the same time, and she does most of her fighting in damp Whitehall offices rather than on rooftops.
Pine's arc is the old le Carré question turned inward. Who do you become when you live inside a lie for long enough? The hotel night manager job is already a performance of service and invisibility. Going undercover is just that performance taken to its logical end. By the middle of the run you stop being sure which version of Pine is the real one, and Hiddleston lets that ambiguity sit there unresolved.
Underneath it is a story about the arms trade, the quiet sort, and the comfort European capitals take in pretending they cannot see it.
The critical response was strong and the awards followed. Six Golden Globes nominations, three wins, going to Hiddleston, Laurie and Colman. Eleven Emmy nominations, two wins. The show drew around eight million viewers in the UK on first broadcast, which in 2016 was serious numbers for BBC One drama. In the US, AMC ran it immediately after Breaking Bad and Mad Men had defined the network as prestige-first, and The Night Manager fit the slot comfortably.
Its place in the le Carré screen canon is still being worked out. It is more commercial than The Spy or the Tinker Tailor film, less formally restrained, more interested in spectacle. That is not a flaw. Farr and Bier found a way to make le Carré work in the Homeland and Slow Horses era without flattening him into a genre piece, and the balance is the reason the show holds up nearly a decade on.
Three things. A director who refused to split the show across episodes and got to sculpt an entire six-hour tone. Three lead actors working at the top of their game, with Laurie in particular reminding everyone what he could do when handed a real adult role. And a source novel from one of the great prose writers about espionage, adapted by people who understood what they were adapting and what they were allowed to change.
Most prestige-era limited series look good in the pilot and run out of ideas by the fourth episode. This one tightens as it goes. By the closing hour Bier is pulling all the threads in at once and Hiddleston is playing about four Pines at the same time. It is the best le Carré adaptation of the streaming decade and one of the reasons people kept commissioning spy shows for the next ten years.
Olivia Colman
Angela Burr
Hugh Laurie
Richard Roper
Adeel Akhtar
Rob Singhal