Yahoo News ‘The Night Agent’: How Thriller Almost Didn’t End Up At Netflix & Underwent Story Tweaks Before Becoming Streamer’s Next Big Hit
Netflix yesterday gave The Night Agent a quick Season 2 pickup only six days after the action-thriller from creator Shawn Ryan and Sony Pictures TV launched with the third-best premiere week of viewing for a new series — only behind Wednesday and Dahmer — putting the series starring Gabriel Basso on track to potentially land in the Top 5 of Netflix’s all-time most popular series.
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“I’m still getting my head around it,” Ryan, creator of The Shield and showrunner of S.W.A.T., said. “I’ve had a long career and certainly some success stories, but nothing quite like this in terms of intense, immediate fan reaction. Almost doesn’t feel real.”
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The renewal comes exactly two years after The Night Agent, inspired by Matthew Quirk’s novel, was pitched to the streamer, which initially was not very impressed. A few things from that original pitch changed before the series reached the air, mainly, taking out the Secret Service storyline from the pilot script and delaying its introduction to Episode 3, as well as ditching Italy as a main location.
As Deadline has reported, Ryan announced in December 2020 that he was adapting The Night Agent, which he listed in tweets about his favorite books of the year under “Books I Read, Decided To Adapt For Television And May Have Already Finished Writing The Pilot Episode.” He combined the novel’s concept and characters with an idea he’d been working on about Secret Service people protecting the daughter of the Vice President while she’s at college, and wrote a spec script in five days.
That original pilot script included the main Night Agent storyline of Peter (Basso), a low-level FBI agent manning a White House emergency spy phone who gets a call from a terrified civilian, Rose (Luciane Buchanan) after her aunt and uncle get murdered, as well as the one about VP’s daughter Maddie and her Secret Service detail in Rome. It was sent to as many as dozen places in February 2021. All but two passed. Those that expressed interest were Netflix and NBCU; they heard the pitch the following month, March 2021.
Lisa Katz, President, Scripted Content at NBCUniversal, who has a longstanding relationship with Ryan, was very enthusiastic about the pitch and the show and offered a pilot production commitment for the project to film a pilot as soon as in two months. The pilot was going to be for NBC or Peacock; under the current setup, NBCU often develops a series before determining whether it would go to the broadcast network or the streamer.
Meanwhile, the producers feared that Netflix was about to pass. I hear they reached out to the streamer’s Danielle Woodrow, then Director UCAN Drama Series, who is close with Ryan and his longtime executive Marney Hochman through their work together as executive producers on CBS’ S.W.A.T..
The outreach helped set up a call between Ryan and Netflix’s VP Drama Series Jinny Howe, during which she shared her concerns about the pilot’s split focus between the Peter/Rose story and the Secret Service storyline. Howe and her team were not opposed to the Secret Service plotline but, based on what they had found to work best on the streamer, they felt it would work better if the pilot focused on Peter and Rose and the world opened up later to include the Secret Service story.
“She was very helpful in making her concerns clear,” Ryan said. “She also understood if I didn’t want to change anything in the script and they wanted to be respectful towards that.”
Ryan asked for a little time to think things over. He quickly saw a way to expand the Peter/Rose pilot story and push the Secret Service story back. Rather than pitch his ideas to Howe, he felt it would be more effective to rewrite the script as if the project already was in development and he was just executing a network note. Over a weekend, he wrote what he called “The Netflix Pass.” His original script was 59 pages, dropping the Secret Service story brought it down to 53, making the story tighter. The biggest addition was the confrontation outside Peter’s apartment with the Rome Tome guys, and Ryan also lengthened some of the Peter/Rose conversations and went deeper with them.
Most of the Secret Service story — as written in the original pilot — made up to Episode 103 where the plot line was ultimately introduced.
“I think the changes to address Netflix’s notes ultimately made it a better pilot,” Ryan said.
Netflix liked the new version and agreed to take in the project in development, setting up a “bird in the hand”-type dilemma for the producers — whether to make an immediate pilot for NBCU but then have to wait longer to (maybe) go to series, unsure whether it would end up at NBC or Peacock, or sell the reworked show for development to Netflix where it could potentially get to series quicker with a casting advantage of being able to offer actors a series, not just a pilot.
Ultimately, Sony was able to negotiate a pretty short series pickup decision window with Netflix, believed to be 45-60 days after they got a series pitch, which made Ryan comfortable going with the global streamer. He quickly put together a very detailed pitch of all ten episodes. It was delivered in mid-late June 2021. Netflix brass must have been impressed as they pulled the trigger just a couple of weeks later, giving the show a green light in early-mid August.
Ryan’s original idea involved VP’s daughter studying in Rome and all action eventually migrating there, culminating into a big finale at an international conference with the President. After conversations with Netflix, a decision was made to keep the season set in the DC area, with the Camp David as backdrop for the big attack.
“It was hard, because I would have loved making the show for Lisa and NBCU, but I’d always from the start felt like the show could really succeed at Netflix, that they didn’t have anything like it, and when the revised script won them over it felt like the right place to go to.”
Not only didn’t Netflix have anything like The Night Agent, the show feels like it could be a high-end network drama in the tradition of 24, and it was approached like one, proving that the model could work for streamers too. And giving Ryan his first streaming hit in the process.
“I tried to apply some old fashioned TV rules to the process — mainly that TV makes stars more than it takes stars,” Ryan said. “I was really excited about discovering a Peter and a Rose that would be new and fresh for most of the audience, and I think that’s been one of the things that viewers are really jazzed about. Gabriel and Luciane are just Peter and Rose to them. I felt at the time that Netflix was one of the last places in town where you could launch a show with no big stars (though certainly [Night Agent lead] Hong Chau’s star has risen a lot since we first cast her) and have a hit. I feel like it’s validation for what we all know to be true — that the right story, with the right actors, even if they’re not well known yet, can be one of the most exciting experiences for viewers — but that not a lot of places practice anymore.”
Indeed, most pitches these days have to have a big-name talent attach to get streamers’ attention. The Night Agent succeeded without well known stars or famous underlying IP.
“I’m tremendously proud of the show,” Ryan said. “I always loved watching it in the editing room and it’s gratifying that so many people agree.”
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