Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland – Picture: Dan Power/Netflix © 2023
Will The Night Agent be back for a season 2? The answer is yes, having been renewed under a week after it first debuted. The renewal is no surprise, given the show has become one of Netflix’s biggest hits. Here’s everything we know about The Night Agent season 2 so far.
Serving as an adaptation of the Matthew Quirk novel, The Night Agent novel (along with some expanded and original ideas), the show follows a young FBI agent who answers a call that plunges him into a deadly conspiracy involving a mole at the White House.
The show lands on Netflix from Sony Pictures Television and showrunner Shawn Ryan who is behind titles like The Shield and S.W.A.T.
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Official Renewal Status: Renewed on March 29th, 2023
Netflix has officially renewed The Night Agent for a second season and announced the second season will debut in 2024 with ten new episodes.
Shawn Ryan, Creator, Showrunner, and Executive Producer of The Night Agent, said on the season 2 renewal:
“The last week has been a whirlwind as we’ve finally been able to share The Night Agent with the world. To see the tremendous reaction to the show has been a great joy and is a credit to our cast, our writers, our directors, our crew and our partners at Sony Pictures Television and Netflix. We couldn’t be any prouder or more excited to get cracking on Season 2 to share the further adventures of Night Action with our newfound fans.”
Katherine Pope, President of Sony Pictures Television, said:
“We are thrilled to see The Night Agent become an instant global sensation and can’t wait to continue telling this story with our remarkable cast, creative leader, Shawn Ryan and our wonderful partners at Netflix.”
Jinny Howe, Vice President of Drama Series at Netflix, said on the renewal:
“We’re proud to see The Night Agent deliver a breakout performance and become instantly embraced around the world. Shawn Ryan has created a spy thriller sensation that viewers cannot get enough of, with a stellar cast featuring Gabriel Basso, Luciane Buchanan and Hong Chau, and we’re here to bring them more of the action and suspense they love.”
Picture: Netflix
As we’ve covered previously, renewals all come down to the numbers. As we’ll cover below, The Night Agent pulled in some big numbers and combine that with the fact the completion rate looks to be high and the show’s budget (which is reportedly between $2-$3M per episode – up to $30M total) made it a no brainer.
Shawn Ryan, ahead of the renewal, implied that there’s room for more story talking to Deadline, saying:
“I certainly have some ideas; I probably want to keep those to myself until the time comes. What I will tell you is that the initial pitch for this show that we sold to Netflix was that each season would tell its own, mostly self-enclosed, a beginning, middle and end story, and any future seasons would include a few but not most of the characters that we saw in the previous season.”
The Night Agent has quickly become one of Netflix’s top performers, with multiple stats backing this up.
Every Tuesday, Netflix releases 40 hourly statistics for their biggest shows and movies, and their data shows that The Night Agent had a huge debut on Netflix.
Per Netflix’s press release for week 1, “the action-thriller ranks #3 for premiere week of viewing across all Season 1 TV and appeared in the Top 10 in 93 countries.”
The show ultimately featured in the Netflix global top 10s for ten weeks in total, picking up 776.62 million hours watched.
| Week Period | Hours Viewed(M) | Rank | Week in Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 19th, 2023 to March 26th, 2023 | 168,710,000 | 1 | 1 |
| March 26th, 2023 to April 2nd, 2023 | 216,390,000 (+28%) | 1 | 2 |
| April 2nd, 2023 to April 9th, 2023 | 130,480,000 (-40%) | 1 | 3 |
| April 9th, 2023 to April 16th, 2023 | 90,040,000 (-31%) | 1 | 4 |
| April 16th, 2023 to April 23rd, 2023 | 56,650,000 (-37%) | 2 | 5 |
| April 23rd, 2023 to April 30th, 2023 | 37,680,000 (-33%) | 4 | 6 |
| April 30th, 2023 to May 7th, 2023 | 26,880,000 (-29%) | 5 | 7 |
| May 7th, 2023 to May 14th, 2023 | 20,340,000 (-24%) | 6 | 8 |
| May 14th, 2023 to May 21st, 2023 | 16,800,000 (-17%) | 8 | 9 |
| May 21st, 2023 to May 28th, 2023 | 12,650,000 (-25%) | 9 | 10 |
Those numbers place the show in the list of most watched shows and movies on Netflix of all time, but given the recent changes in Netflix methodology, it either ranks fifth or sixth depending on the metric you use:
- Based on the first 28 days metric, it is the fifth most-watched show of all time with 626.99M hours
- Based on the first 91 days, it’s the sixth most-watched show of all time, with 803.70M hours watched (98.20M CVE viewers)
Nielsen numbers also showed the series performed well, specifically in the United States (on connected devices), featuring in the Nielsen top 10s for seven weeks, clocking up 173.50 million hours:
| Week Start | Week End | Nielsen Rank | Episodes | Raw Minutes | Converted Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| March 20th, 2023 | March 26th, 2023 | 1 | 10 | 2,604 million minutes | 43.400 million hours |
| March 27th, 2023 | April 2nd, 2023 | 1 | 10 | 3,058 million minutes | 50.967 million hours |
| April 3rd, 2023 | April 9th, 2023 | 1 | 10 | 1,852 million minutes | 30.867 million hours |
| April 10th, 2023 | April 16th, 2023 | 2 | 10 | 1,166 million minutes | 19.433 million hours |
| April 17th, 2023 | April 23rd, 2023 | 5 | 10 | 760 million minutes | 12.667 million hours |
| April 24th, 2023 | April 30th, 2023 | 6 | 10 | 560 million minutes | 9.333 million hours |
| May 1st, 2023 | May 7th, 2023 | 8 | 10 | 410 million minutes | 6.833 million hours |
If we break down the hour data into CVE (Complete Viewing Equivalent – taking the length of the show and dividing by the hours) we can see it outperformed Keep Breathing and 1899 but was just shy of The Watcher.
In our top 10 report for the first week, What’s on Netflix contributor Frederic said the show had the “second-best launch for any series released on a Thursday, just behind The Watcher, which ended up being renewed (a feat for a limited series at the time).”
Using CVE, we can see that after 14 days, the show was one of the top-performing debut English language series, only behind The Watcher and Wednesday.
Renewed Netflix Shows vs Canceled Netflix Shows in CVEs (First 14 days performance)
What about external factors? The show rocketed the ranks according to TelevisionStats.com, measuring from sources like Wikipedia, Google Search, Reddit, and IMDb. As of March 25th, it’s the number 1 show on the internet, beating out South Park, Daisy Jones & the Six, Yellowjackets, and Love is Blind. It performed well against The Diplomat (also renewed for a season 2) but didn’t have the same legs as a show like Ginny & Georgia.
TelevisionStats.com graph of popularity for The Night Agent vs The Diplomat and Ginny & Georgia
How about critical acclaim? Audience scores have been outpacing critics’ scores thus far, but it’s mostly positive all around.
On RottenTomatoes, as of March 29th, the show holds an 82% score from audiences and 69% from critics. The series holds a 7.7/10 based on over 12,000 reviews on IMDb, and over on Metacritic holds a 68 rating.
Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2023
Warning: spoilers for The Night Agent season 1 are ahead.
While The Night Agent season 1 certainly answers the most prominent questions by the end of episode 10, there’s still a lot to be learned.
By the time the end credits roll, we’ve learned that Diane Farr, the president’s own chief of staff, is the mole and worked with Vice President Redfield and Gordon Wick to plan the metro bombing. As a result, The Night Agent wraps up relatively nicely, but there’s still plenty to be explored potentially. After all, Peter ends the season by jetting off for his first mission.
As Ryan mentioned in the aforementioned Deadline interview, he suggested that if they’re “successful enough that Netflix wants more seasons, I think there’d be a whole new world in which you would see a limited number of characters from this current season going into that. ”
Ryan also covered some of the biggest questions season 2 would have to seek to answer, including:
- What does it mean that Peter would be a night agent?
- Where is Peter going next?
- With Rose heading back to California, where does that leave Peter and Rose?
Additional snippets of information came from Ryan in a ComicBook.com interview where he revealed season 2 would not be taking place in Washington DC saying:
“We’ll be in a different part of the world exploring different characters than we had in Season One. And we’re determining who from Season One might appear in Season Two. But essentially we’re going to be telling a whole brand-new story, which is exciting and scary.”
Where is The Night Agent Season 2 in production?
As of June 2023, the show has yet to enter production for its second season, and it’s almost certainly the case that it won’t get underway until the WGA strike resolves.
Given the renewal time, it’s likely that some work began on scripts for season 2, but all of the writers on the show have been striking since May 1st, 2023.
I’d rather be writing Season 2 of #TheNightAgent for @netflix rather than picketing them, but all writers need a fair deal before we can resume our work. We create the TV shows and movies that drive billions in profits. Writers deserve their fair share. #UnionStrong pic.twitter.com/aFpcqVqYSO
— Shawn Ryan (@ShawnRyanTV) May 5, 2023
The Night Agent writers, support staff, first AD Marijke, Peter Sutherland stunt double Matt and Erik Monks on strike
While waiting for The Night Agent season 2, Matthew Quirk has plenty of other novels to read. Other Quirk novels like Hour of the Assassin, The Directive, Cold Barrel Zero, Dead Man Switch, or Red Warning
All these books are also ripe for adaptations and not necessarily as part of The Night Agent because, as the author explains on Twitter, “they’re mostly standalones.”
Matthew Quirk’s most recent book, Inside Threat, was released on June 13th, 2023.
My new book Inside Threat hits stores today! Great for Father’s Day.
Amazon https://t.co/gjTHjfYXsX
B&N https://t.co/qB3p4VXaMn
Indies https://t.co/R1xuGOvbL5
Apple https://t.co/mHwPBK91gt
Google https://t.co/8dECKlv3cd@HarperCollins @wmmorrowbooks@netflix@TNAWriters pic.twitter.com/kIK4lfhmKL— Matthew Quirk (@mquirk) June 13, 2023
Are you looking forward to watching The Night Agent season 2 on Netflix in 2024? Let us know in the comments down below.