Week-to-Week: In praise of streaming TV that cares about being, well, TV
Notes on the well-made Dadcore of Netflix's The Night Agent from creator Shawn Ryan
When I sat down to watch the screeners of Netflix’s The Night Agent, it was because of Shawn Ryan. In his interview with Dan Fienberg and Lesley Goldberg on the TV’s Top 5 podcast, Ryan notes that the breakout success of FX’s The Shield was both a tremendous blessing and somewhat of a curse, as his career will forever be defined by the first show he ever made.
It’s a guarantee that people will pay attention when his name is attached to a project, but the expectations that people like subscribers to this newsletter will bring to the shows might not match what he describes as focusing on being a “working television writer" having been under an overall deal at Sony since 2011. This is particularly true given that the majority of his subsequent projects were broadcast dramas that have increasingly been separated from critical acclaim.
And yet this is what made me most interested to check out The Night Agent. Sure, the idea of seeing the latest TV show from the mind behind The Shield is fine and all, but I chose to find the time to watch the screeners before its debut last week because it was a show made by someone who is actively invested in the project of making television. Ryan’s resume is filled with a wide range of different shows that have each had to confront existing genres and story formats to survive, and by continuing to make television for broad audiences he’s helping mentor young writers on the nuts and bolts of constructing a TV show.1
I was particularly interested to know what this would look like in a modern streaming context: while Ryan briefly dabbled in streaming early in Amazon’s slate with Mad Dogs, he’s otherwise been working with broadcast networks as we’ve seen streaming shows increasingly drift away from structure and pacing in quest of the elusive “ten-hour movie.” The appeal of a Shawn Ryan Streaming Show—an SRSS, if you will—was getting the opportunity to see how a showrunner invested in the nuts and bolts would leverage the pitfalls and potentials of the binge release.
But I understand that even if this itself sounds intriguing, there might be a barrier to the fact he was doing so within a genre I refer to as Dadcore—The Night Agent is part of a long list of action-y thrillers like Amazon’s Jack Ryan and Reacher, and Netflix’s recent The Recruit. In his aforementioned podcast interview, Ryan talks about how he sees his career as a longstanding effort to “class up” genres that are often discredited, whether it be cop shows (The Shield) or detective shows (Terriers). But as someone who increasingly appreciates when a show understands its place in the TV ecosystem, the idea of a smartly-constructed take on this genre was a real selling point, and I was excited to see how he navigated some of the hurdles of telling stories to modern audiences within this world of espionage and political intrigue.
I ended up finishing the entire season before it premiered last week, and while I do want to discuss a few story details (and may open a Chat thread to do so), I want to primarily focus on the things I noticed in the early going that indicated this wasn’t just a haphazardly plotted streaming show.
No In Medias Res Opening
When you have a story about a fish out of water, the easiest way to ensure your audience understands the stakes is to throw the audience into the deep end by showing us a glimpse of a future development. It’s a technique that Alias drove into the ground over the course of its run, most famously in its Super Bowl episode when the goal was to convince the NFL audience to keep watching. And it seems like, for streaming shows, the same incentive is there to convince someone who just spent ten minutes trying to decide what to watch to stick around to get hooked into your story—The Recruit did this when it debuted on Netflix late last year, dropping us right into a gunfight despite the show’s story actually starting with Noah Centineo as a rookie CIA lawyer who’s never even really been in the field.
But beyond the fact that it’s grown stale over the past two decades (yes, it’s been 20 years since “Phase One”), it’s also a strategy that reveals a lot of information about where the show is heading, which creates a scaffold of storytelling that restricts our imagination of the show’s trajectory. By comparison, The Night Agent understands the expectation that their action thriller needs to start with action, but builds the story in such a way that a flashback—to the bombing of a Metro car in Washington D.C. that F.B.I. Peter Sutherland thwarted a year before he ended up in the basement of The White House answering a phone that almost never rings—can offer the initial hook but it doesn’t force the story itself into a particular box.
Ultimately, the show doesn’t actually circle back to the train bombing as a central storyline until later in the season. At this point, it’s fodder for understanding Peter’s demotion within the F.B.I. and the rumors surrounding him, along with the mysterious man with the snake tattoo that teases further investigation down the line. It sets a tone that likely keeps people watching—the show has been the No. 1 show on Netflix in the U.S. over the weekend—but doesn’t bog the show down in so much future story that it begins to feel prescriptive.
TV or Not TV is the question, on purpose
Immediately after the “action” flashback, though, The Night Agent pivots to Rose Larkin preparing to give a TED Talk. There’s no big twist in this scene, and there’s definitely no action—it’s just there to establish that a year ago when Peter Sutherland was rescuing a train of passengers from a terrorist attack in D.C., Rose was on her way to tech industry supremacy. It’s a scene that could’ve worked in a procedural version of this concept, in which Rose is our case of the week as we find her moving in with her aunt and uncle after declaring bankruptcy a year later, unaware she’s about to become embroiled in a situation much bigger than herself that just so happens to end with her on the other end of Peter’s phone.
What follows over the first half of the season or so is this really fascinating dance between embracing the show’s televisual dynamics and also pushing back against them in a way that streaming allows. The first episode is built to develop the connection between Peter and Rose as he walks her through an attack on her aunt and uncle’s home and subsequent threats to her life when she manages to escape with his assistance. It’s the first act of the two-hour action movie version of their story, and eventually they end up in White House custody unsure of who to trust and what the path forward looks like. That brings some other characters into the picture, like Hong Chau as the White House chief of staff and Robert Patrick as the deputy FBI director, but there’s not really a show happening in and around the story…until the end of the first episode.
There, the show reintroduces one of the killers from the earlier attack, this time with a partner. We see them use a kidnapped baby to get into a woman’s house where they kill her and acquire a bag of unknown origin, before texting an unknown number that tells them to get back to D.C. to finish what they started. And while it’s obviously related to our case in some way, it’s effectively a second cold open, except this one promises the show will be expanding its scope to the villain’s side of the story and bringing us one step closer to the dynamics of, say, a season of 24.
But notably, the show doesn’t rush into that focus. The killers spend the second episode fleshing out their romantic relationship, as opposed to digging deeper into the main story, and it’s not until the third episode that we fully complete the show’s structure by introducing Chelsea Arrington, who heads the secret service detail for the Vice President’s daughter. Once that happens, we’ve got a more fleshed out television show that can jump between stories and eventually—spoiler alert—bring them together. But the show is constantly shifting gears in the early episodes, slowing down the pace to simply let characters interact as the show fills out around them. The show still ends with the third act of the action movie the premiere sets up, but in between it lets itself become a slow burn TV show, subtly shifting focus to the benefit of the story once it needs to escalate the tension at the end of the season.
Semblance of Structure
The Night Agent never feels like a broadcast procedural: even if it’s easy to imagine a more episodic take on “F.B.I. agent answers phone and gets wrapped up in scandal,” the show presents its stories in a heavily serialized way that serves the binge environment of Netflix well.
However, the choice to create a sense of structure through opening flashbacks in every episode is a meaningful and helpful gesture that ensures every episode is grounded in being productive to that larger goal. While there are definitely early episodes where Peter and Rose make less progress than one might expect of an ongoing story, there’s always something new being added in other stories in those episodes, and the flashbacks go a long way to ensuring that we’re seeing the beginning (and end) of each episode as meaningful sign posts in the larger experience of the narrative.
These are not particularly deep flashbacks—in some cases they show us glimpses of moments we’ve seen discussed elsewhere, or which will be referenced in the episode that follows. But they’re particularly effective at ensuring that every corner of the story has a degree of history attached to it, whether it’s Peter and Rose, the assassins hot on their trail, or all the characters that populate the Vice President’s daughter corner of the story that there wasn’t even of a whiff of in the premiere. The show’s structure is not revolutionary, or revelatory, but it’s workmanlike and solid, which elevates the project on the whole.
Now, obviously, there are some fundamentals that need to be in place, and The Night Agent has those: Chau certainly brings the most conspicuous acting resume, but Gabriel Basso strikes a really great balance between carrying the trauma of Peter’s past (including that train attack) while also being charming enough to create the romantic sparks the show wants between him and Rose. I don’t know if any of the serialized mysteries stand out as especially compelling, but the combination works as a general hook, and the twists and turns come often enough and with enough subtlety behind them to allow the show to never boil down to an overly simple us vs. them dynamic. Put simply, it’s well-made Dadcore that’s elevated not because it’s trying to reinvent the wheel, but because it’s inspected the wheel, greased it up well, and installed a team who are dedicated to understanding how wheels work.
And while it’s not going to change the future of television, it’s probably a better use of your time than any number of shows that aim for that goal.
Stray observations
The most telling detail from Ryan’s interview with Dan and Lesley was that The Night Agent is actually a combination of two shows—an adaptation of Matthew Quirk’s novel and an unrelated Secret Service show—he was developing but felt wouldn’t be enough content for a show. Once you learn this fact it becomes pretty transparent, but beyond the fact it worked out, it’s just refreshing to see a writer aware that some concepts aren’t enough to fill out even a shorter TV season. I hope many other showrunners look to his example when they sit down with their next streaming project.
Elsewhere, I’m reaching the end of a watch of The Traitors U.K., which has been a really interesting viewing experience given how much is a carbon copy of the U.S. version (all the challenges) but then how different the vibes are with no reality stars and a lot of different strategy. Will probably throw on Australia eventually.
I also half-watched the first couple of episodes of the fourth season of Netflix’s Love is Blind—I sat out this stage of the third season, but then between group chats and Twitter I got sucked into the later episodes, and realized that it’s a confection worth putting on while, say, writing this newsletter or editing this week’s Ted Lasso review. It’s just enjoyable to watch a show where you’re rooting for no one and want to see how many different variations of toxic behavior they’ll fall into by the time they reach the altar.
And because my use of TV time is definitely not adhering to any prestige standards, I finished off Disney+ legacyquel National Treasure: Edge of History, which I started with my mother over the holidays. It’s a trifling thing, but Catherine Zeta-Jones got a fair amount to do as the villain, and I’m really curious to see if they pull the trigger on making more of this Gen Z riff on the franchise or finally make National Treasure 3 (or both).
I also made it to theaters for John Wick 4, which I enjoyed a lot even without the fact that it visited two cities I went to for the first time in the past year (Paris and Osaka). I left fully satisfied with how the film delivered on the expectations of the franchise to date, but I have a bunch of questions of where they go from here with both feature and television spinoffs. The film’s huge box office result is great, but will any of those people subscribe to Peacock to watch a limited series about the hotel, or turn up for Ana de Armas? I’m unsure, but the staircase scene (which Matt Singer has a great interview covering) was a masterpiece either way.
And on the streaming front, after multiple failed attempts to get the HBO Max app to work offline while traveling overseas, I finally watched The Menu, which was definitely a movie I would have appreciated a bit more if I hadn’t had so many of the details spoiled, but which I still enjoyed alright under the given circumstances. I don’t ultimately think it has a whole lot to say, given what it needs to devolve into, but it’s a fun time at the movies tab on your third-favorite streaming app. I also, in honor of David Lowery’s forthcoming take on Peter Pan coming to Disney+, I put on the underwatched and rock solid Pete’s Dragon, which is worth a watch if you’re wondering if there’s any creativity to be found in the ongoing project of the Disney live action remake.
In the case of The Night Agent, this includes Imogen Browder, whose college webseries I wrote about nearly a decade ago. It was a fun blast from the past seeing her credit pop up after episode six.
I’m inclined to agree with seemingly every TV critic that there is value to more episodic television rather than ten-hour “movies.” But I wonder whether this is something that audiences generally care about or desire, or if it’s exhausted TV critics trying to make their jobs more manageable since you don’t need to watch five episodes to understand / accurately critique an episodic show.
My parents and I rarely watch the same thing, but we are all watching this. It is decent enough. But I just can’t with Hong Chau’s wig. It is so distracting.
I also saw the Shazam movie. I was one of two people in the theater. Ant Man is a masterpiece in comparison. There’s a fucking Skittles commercial in the middle of the movie. They literally say, “taste the rainbow”. Twice.