How the 'risk' of making The Night Manager paid off
March 25, 2016 5:46 PM   Subscribe

BBC: It's been a ratings smash, caused meltdown on social media and an online leak of the last episode has made global headlines. But is the success of the TV adaptation of John Le Carre's The Night Manager down to its star names - or the enduring appeal of the spy? [There are no actual spoilers in this piece, although there are a couple of images from later episodes.]
posted by marienbad (28 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
It looks like it's good, but the BBC is in a damn shoddy state if co-producing a LeCarre adaptation is considered risky.
posted by Artw at 5:58 PM on March 25, 2016 [19 favorites]


I've watched the first few episodes so far. It's quite excellent.
posted by dazed_one at 6:13 PM on March 25, 2016


I think the biggest risk was updating the story. It was originally set in the 90's in South America, they changed it to 2015 in the Middle East. It works very well, and I can't wait for the finale on Sunday.
posted by clorox at 6:22 PM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


There's an increased public awareness of the deeply ambiguous world that Le Carre writes about.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:24 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I've watched the whole thing, it is so good, and I am fucking DYING over here waiting to geek out on fanfare about it.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:32 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I've only seen two episodes so far, but it's pretty good. I like seeing Hugh Laurie play a baddie.
posted by figurant at 6:40 PM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]


He's no stranger to the spy game.
posted by Artw at 6:43 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


John Le Carré is awesome and his work has been well-adapted several times before. I know that low-key, adult-as-in-for-grown-ups television can be risky, but it's not as if they were doing an all-cockatiel version of Ubu Roi.
posted by Sticherbeast at 6:52 PM on March 25, 2016 [14 favorites]


ULTRA DARING ADAPTATION OF LITTLE KNOWN AUTHOR JANE AUSTEN.
posted by Artw at 7:00 PM on March 25, 2016 [5 favorites]


Looks like it's playing on AMC in the US in April.
posted by octothorpe at 7:28 PM on March 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


...but it's not as if they were doing an all-cockatiel version of Ubu Roi

That's more of a Netflix production.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:54 PM on March 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


The current Night Manager is a real howler. A script that consists of a series of head-spinning implausibilities interspersed with various important characters randomly blurting out the important details to the lead character, who is played with pantomime ineptitude by an actor who has as many looks as Zoolander.

If you are a connoisseur of truly bad television, don't miss this one. The hour episodes do drag at times but ultimately, it delivers -- your eyes will roll, you'll predict lines before the actors get the words out, and you might spit out your drink occasionally.
posted by grounded at 9:22 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]


I loved the book. I'll watch the mini-series when it comes to the US next month. But why is Jed blonde when the book repeatedly mentions her chestnut hair?

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." -John Le Carré
posted by swerve at 9:28 PM on March 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


Watching the 2nd Episode now. It's excellent stuff.
posted by prodigalsun at 9:50 PM on March 25, 2016


"Letting" a woman direct, substituting a female for a male supporting character, these are pretty daring things for Le Carre and the Beeb.
posted by gingerest at 10:00 PM on March 25, 2016 [3 favorites]


In some ways, it's a very old-fashioned glamor piece. Beautiful settings lavishly filmed, lots of our main character hanging around with rich and/or beautiful people and being beautiful himself. The color palette looks as if it were specifically engineered to bring out the color of Hiddleston's eyes. I think people find that soothing even in the midst of a fair amount of ultraviolence.
posted by praemunire at 11:45 PM on March 25, 2016


Le Carré himself wrote an interesting piece about this adaptation and his others.
posted by twsf at 11:55 PM on March 25, 2016 [4 favorites]


The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provided me with my first experience of the film trade, and in retrospect it was an unusually benign baptism of fire.

I was going to say, with that one under your belt it can't be too bad.
posted by Artw at 12:02 AM on March 26, 2016


"The color palette looks as if it were specifically engineered to bring out the color of Hiddleston's eyes."

The transformation to Mr. Pine and the Matterhorn in episode one seizes this. The cold view and rare air. Stars dancing under purple hue. The warm timbre of the "lodge".
I think this adaptation is fair in its high flying fancy. The list of weapons for example is quite a mixed bag of WTF stuff with napalm bring last. What is plausible is a night managers cover for intelligence operations. Of course, ones cover can never be blown but here it seems very one suspects, knows, or just goes about folding the guest list. Still, who has better access. That hero from Rwanda who ran The Michelin for example.
Here is a corresponding study concering: 'The Hotel in Operations'

Charming title.
posted by clavdivs at 2:32 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


.... A list actors, A list author, conventional spy drama. How on EARTH is that a 'risk' of any kind? The publicity machine on this churned so hard that it makes me wonder what's really going on.

And, yes, the way they trumpeted 'letting' a woman direct and how amazingly right on they were for taking one single 3d character and making it female and OH MY 'allowing' the role to be played by a pregnant actor. I can't help but feel this was desperate overkill to make up for a show so male-centric and boring I couldn't get past the first episode.

I acknowledge that it was lovely to look at, but... I don't get it, I really don't. I like explosions and spies and popcorn TV, but I am also bored at women being used as props or killed as motivation, I am tired of abuse/rape victims who immediately fall into the hero's arms because he's Tom Hiddlestone and have unproblematic non-ptsd triggering sex and I'm bored of the white man who runs or works in a horrible, colonialist, elitist, western imperial-focused system and yet he is magically OK because somehow he has a mate who is a local and works in the kitchen but inexiplicably loves him for reasons we never find out (and we're supposed to admire him because he's learnt the language unlike all these other awful bad white men) and ARGH.

It's not just that it's bad, or that it's problematic (representation of women, yadda), but that it is tedious. Not one part of it felt like something I hadn't seen 200 times already.
posted by AFII at 3:20 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


Watched the first ep, got very bored halfway through... not bothered to go back. And yeah, I can see how this is supposed to be risky (the BBC just seems to be dying a slow death now)

Of course one of the few things the BBC did recently that I actually thought was pretty good - that also happened to be a spy drama with an actual bit of risk to it - The Game - got dropped after its first series.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:32 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


The risk? How many ways can even a gold-plated production go wrong... it may not be the riskiest artistic concept ever, but the BBC is under attack at the moment and having a big production go wrong would be really damaging.

I'm really enjoying TNM, which almost has the productiong values of a Bond movie but includes genuine issues of morality and risk. There are some "Really? REALLY?" issues where your disbelief needs to be suspended like Harold Lloyd from a clockface, but let's see what the finale wraps up and what it lets down.

Has the best evil sidekick ever, too.

an all-cockatiel version of Ubu Roi


IWOULDWATCHLISTLETMEWATCHTHISNOWWHEREISITSLYTSLYTSLYT
posted by Devonian at 4:01 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am extremely stoked that The Night Manager is doing well. I like the book a great deal on its own terms, but mostly I'm excited that an increased willingness to throw money at Le Carré adaptations might get us the miniseries of The Honourable Schoolboy to which I have long felt entitled, simply by wanting it so badly. So when I read that

there's even been speculation that there will be a sequel for The Night Manager
I have to do a Guinness-as-Smiley and stare vacantly while wiping my spectacles with the fat end of my tie.
posted by Zeinab Badawi's Twenty Hotels at 8:56 AM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]


I finished the book last week and just started watching the series today. There are a number of changes from the book, especially in the shift to Mallorca, and even down to what Roper calls Jed (same as everyone else - no Jeds).

I don't know how interested I'd be if I hadn't just finished the book, though. I was definitely sorry to see that the series missed the whole tangent about Herr Kaspar's wig (which has next to nothing to do with the story anyway, but it's a good random detail, and makes the time in Switzerland about more than just snow).
posted by minsies at 11:07 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]


"The photography and acting are good," would be a Minnesota Nice observation, but it's still alright. Olivia Colman is great in this.
posted by detachd at 4:39 PM on March 26, 2016


I just finished watching the whole series as a result of seeing this post earlier today. I didn't read the thread beforehand, which is a good thing because I probably would have been dissuaded from watching and I mostly enjoyed it.

That said, I think most of the criticisms above are valid. I came close to turning it off in the first episode because of the cliched sexism. That got better and then got worse again, but by the time the badness had returned, I was invested in other aspects of the show.

And then the other problem -- which came as a huge surprise in a Le Carre adaptation -- is how implausible and unrealistic it very often was. Nothing about Hugh Laurie's villain was even remotely believable and, in fact, he might as well have been the villain in a Roger Moore-era Bond film. It's partly his character -- they actually give him a mustache-twirling line where he says that you become a man when you realize the world is rotten and all the fun that can be had is in enjoying the rottenness -- but, other than that aspect of his character, it's not that terribly bad and Laurie is a joy to watch. And of course so is Olivia Colman. But everything about his weapons-dealing is just dumb. This is one of the Le Carre novels I've not read -- and he was a spy himself and he usually gets this stuff right -- so I can only assume that all of the problems are in the adaptation. But it just made me angry because it's so dumb. And there's a particular scene in the fourth episode that I thought at first had induced an epileptic seizure in me until I realized that it was just the most extreme version of an involuntary eye-roll of incredulity.

But it was beautifully filmed with high production values all-around and some great acting (and a lot of mediocre acting) and it did feel like a long, Hollywood, well-made blockbuster spy thriller which personally I found was an enjoyable six hours.

Having said that I nevertheless enjoyed it, I do want to emphasize how poorly this compares to, say, The Honourable Woman, which got much less attention and love. In every respect, except splosions and gratuitous nudity, this series is hugely inferior to THW. At the time -- and I watched it twice -- I felt that some aspects of The Honourable Woman were a bit on-the-nose and overwrought but in retrospect and in contrast to The Night Manager, it was an exercise in British understatement and nuance, lies and more lies underneath them, trenchant political commentary, mordant and ironic spy humor, and several interrelated intense character studies. In other words, it was far more essentially Le Carre, even though it wasn't, than this was, which was. That this series gets all the attention and praise says something depressing, possibly related to how female-centric THW was (and how empowered all the female characters were and how it passed the Bechdel test) and how male-centric and implicitly sexist this was, despite the one character they gender-switched, which is sort of the solitary exception that proves the rule.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:39 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh, the book is plenty unrealistic. It's definitely a combination of source material and the adaptation in this case, but any adaptation would struggle to make Roper's dealings realistic.
posted by minsies at 10:29 AM on March 27, 2016


Thoroughly enjoyed it. I was half-dreading, half-hoping for an ending similar in tone to the ending of A Delicate Truth, but I'm fine with how things wrapped up. I hope it does well on AMC, and that we get more lavish le Carré adaptations in the near future.
posted by clorox at 4:03 AM on March 28, 2016


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