Since Sean Connery lit a cigarette at a chemin de fer table and first introduced himself as "Bond, James Bond" in "Dr. No," spies have rarely been far from the big or little screen, coming in all shapes and sexes, served straight or as spoofs. Within the space of a week, Netflix has premiered two such series: the straightforward conspiracy thriller "The Night Agent" and the cartoon "Agent Elvis" — a "double Agent" bill, you cannot stop me from saying.
Created by Shawn "The Shield" Ryan and based on a 2019 novel by Matthew Quirk (an Atlantic reporter turned thriller machine), "The Night Agent" is no worse than workmanlike but, also, workmanlike. It's nothing special, nothing awful and exactly what many want from television, with action for its own sake — twists and turns and sundry threads tangled, untangled and finally tied in a bow. The characters are generic — plucky heroes, superior superiors, inscrutable politicians, eccentric assassins — which is not in itself a problem; it's just that little interesting is done with them.
Gabriel Basso plays Peter Sutherland, an FBI agent we meet on a D.C. Metro train, giving up his seat to a woman laden with packages, then making funny faces at her child to telegraph his goodness. Spotting a suspicious person placing a suspicious package suspiciously beneath a seat, Peter determines that it's a bomb, so he pulls the emergency brake and gets all but one person out alive before things go boom. This does not make him the national hero one might expect so much as the target of trolls who believe he had something to do with the bombing. (His late father was a famous traitor, and he is tarred with that brush.)
