Cancel those weekend plans and plump up the sofa cushions: one of Netflix’s biggest ever hit series is back. By this, I don’t mean Squid Game, the inventive Korean thriller that returned for season two at Christmas. Or Wednesday, the teen-focused Addams Family adaptation due to release its much-anticipated second season later this year. I don’t mean Ryan Murphy’s Monster, either – another streaming phenomenon that recently came back for more. No, I’m talking about The Night Agent, the pulpy spy series that debuted in March 2023 and became the streamer’s sixth-most-viewed series ever. Strangely, amid a sea of constantly replenishing “content”, The Night Agent may turn out to be one of the few shows whose return doesn’t disappoint.
For many TV series, the second go-around – what American pundits sometimes refer to as a “sophomore season” – has proved a difficult nut to crack. The aforementioned Squid Game, for instance, failed to recapture the zeitgeisty buzz of its first season, which cut through pop culture like a thunderbolt during the tail end of the Covid pandemic. So, too, did the juggernaut hit Tiger King when it returned for a redundant season two. This isn’t a problem unique to Netflix, of course – acclaimed shows on traditional networks, such as True Detectives or Yellowjackets, have been completely derailed by an errant season two. But it’s a predicament that Netflix finds itself in particularly often, thanks chiefly to the sheer volume of content being churned out, and the considerable, pressure-inducing audience size for any one hit.
