After a decade away, Tom Hiddleston is going undercover again as Jonathan Pine and this time he’s getting into an explosive, sexually fluid power threesome. It’s just what Le Carré would have wanted
F
or screenwriter David Farr, The Night Manager’s return is a dream come true. Literally. “Having not thought about the show for five years, a vivid image came to me in bed one night,” he says. “I saw a boy in a Colombian monastery, waiting for a black car to come over the hill. For some bizarre reason, I knew who those characters were. Suddenly, I was half-awake and the rest came flying out of me. I wrote it all down in case I forgot. In the morning, I looked at my notes and thought: ‘This is good, actually.’”
He’s not wrong. It’s a special drama that can leave a decade-long gap between series but still be welcomed back with widespread excitement. It’s testament to The Night Manager’s quality that its comeback is the first must-watch show of 2026.
The 2016 debut run, based on John le Carré’s 1993 novel – the first he wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union – followed hotelier turned spy Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) as he went undercover to bring down arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie), AKA “the worst man in the world”. Farr’s lavish adaptation became event TV, pulling in 10 million viewers and selling to 180 countries. Hiddleston, Laurie and Olivia Colman all won Golden Globes for their performances. But there was a small problem: there wasn’t another book.
