Has there been a more devastating TV finale? Not in recent memory, that’s for sure. The Night Manager’s second season grew in confidence and ambition with each episode, culminating in a Shakespearean finale that saved its most savage work for last. In six tragic minutes, it bumped off two, maybe three major characters like they were names on a ledger. Angela Burr – Olivia Colman’s dogged intelligence operative – gunned down at her home in France, her young daughter close by. Teddy Dos Santos – the illegitimate son (played by Diego Calva) we’d spent six episodes learning to love – executed by his own father with a bullet to the head. And Jonathan Pine, Tom Hiddleston’s haunted operative who’d been the fulcrum around which much of the BBC drama revolved, left bleeding out in the dirt while his enemies closed in. Richard Roper – the worst man in the world – got his freedom back. The bad guy won. Bleakly, bumptiously.
This was appointment viewing that refused to play it safe. No last-minute reversals, no heroic resurrections, no comforting restoration of moral order. “Those big decisions come quite early,” David Farr, the series’ screenwriter, tells me, all but admitting that he started with the ending first. “And in a weird way, you hook everything off that. I’ve got to earn that.” He certainly earned it. Moving away from John le Carré’s source material – upon which series one had been based – these six episodes may have stretched credulity at times but found a real frisson in the performances and the sheer daring of the story.
