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 comes as no surprise given the explosive first week the show had on Netflix. 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.
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 10 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.”
This section will be a work in progress in the coming weeks as we track all the different metrics for The Night Agent.
Netflix themselves every Tuesday 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 their press release, “the action-thriller ranks #3 for premiere week of viewing across all Season 1 TV and appeared in the Top 10 in 93 countries.”
Here’s how the weekly hourly numbers break down so far:
| Week Period | Hours Viewed(M) | Rank | Week in Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 19th, 2023 to March 26th, 2023 | 168,710,000 | 1 | 1 |
How does the numbers compare with other Netflix Originals? Well, we can compare to a few other shows that debuted within the last year and just in terms of opening weekends, The Night Agent beat out the likes of The Watcher, The Recruit, and The Lincoln Lawyer.
The Night Agent Raw Hours vs other Netflix Originals
If we break down the hour data into CVE (Complete Viewing Equivalent – taking the length of the show and divide 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).”
Early stats from FlixPatrol suggests The Night Agent has become the biggest show on Netflix worldwide following its initial debut. By March 26th, 80 countries had The Night Agent as the number 1 show, with eight countries having it as the number 2 show or South Korea’s third biggest show.
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.
TelevisionStats.com stats for The Night Agent
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?
Of course, Matthew Quirk does have plenty of other novels ripe for adaptations, but as the author explains on Twitter, “they’re mostly standalones”.
With that said, who’s to say that other Quirk novels like Hour of the Assassin, The Directive, Cold Barrel Zero, Dead Man Switch, Red Warning, or Inside Threat couldn’t be tweaked or retooled for an entire Shawn Ryan/Matthew Quirk Netflix universe.
Are you looking forward to watching The Night Agent season 2 on Netflix in 2024? Let us know in the comments down below.