The Night Agent: Netflix comfort food and cardboard politicians
Mon Jan 13 2025
Netflix has a new season of its political action thriller TV show The Night Agent in the hopper for later this month. I've been rewatching the first season over the past couple of weeks and I find myself asking why? What is it about this show that would prompt me to give it another 9 or 10 hours of my attention? Yes, it's enjoyable but it's also kinda unremarkable.
Bingeable as a beach read and just as forgettable, The Night Agent is a routine spy thriller told with commendable bravado.
If you read reviews of this show you're likely to see words like "serviceable" and "comfortable." Writing for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico says of the series, "While the world of high-concept television has largely moved on to twisty plots and cultural commentaries, there’s something enjoyable about just watching a well-made, old-fashioned thriller play out over ten episodes. Nothing about “The Night Agent” breaks any molds, but that shouldn’t be the standard for every streaming series."
In other words, The Night Agent is the entertainment equivalent of a Totino's Frozen Pizza. It has very little nutritional value but it's easy to consume and it's still technically pizza so it's also kinda yummy.
This kind of entertainment product is nothing new. Hollywood has been churning out mediocre thrillers since the dawn of time. But if you look through the catalog of Netflix originals you're going to find a lot of stuff that fits this same mold. The same goes for Amazon and Apple. People have always complained about the garbage the entertainment industry produces but we all know the reason. The world is literally on fire so of course we're going to keep consuming comforting junk. Capitalism will happily ruin your life and then sell you palliatives to make you feel better.
A comforting thriller sounds like an oxymoron but they exist in abundance. How can a genre meant to give you thrills instead be a source of relaxation and yet somehow still work? With horror movies the viewer can be terrified and still enjoy the experience, but that is a different phenomena. Few horror fans would describe the best horror films as relaxing to watch.
When it comes to American political thrillers like The Night Agent there is solace to be found in the soothing lies they tell about the world. They tell us that while there may be a few bad actors in the halls of power there are still good people fighting them behind the scenes to keep the United States from losing the moral high ground we pretend to have in the world.
One recurring manifestation of this lie is the way politicians, especially US Presidents, are depicted. In The Night Agent we hear White House Chief of Staff Diane Farr saying that she would do anything to protect President Michelle Travers because she believes her policies are so important to improving the country. What policies is she talking about? That, of course, is never discussed. All we know is that she's trying to have some kind of peace talks with a controversial political leader from the Balkans. If you stopped a hundred people on the street in any American city and asked them to point to the Balkans on a map I doubt if more than a handful would be up to the task. I know I wouldn't.
President Benjamin Asher in the 2013 movie Olympus Has Fallen is painted with an equally broad brush. Just as in The Night Agent we are never told much about this fake President's politics. President James Sawyer in White House Down, which was released 3 months after Olympus Has Fallen, is clearly meant to be an imitation of Barack Obama but his politics are still somewhat vague. That film is interesting in its own right but I'll save that for another post.
More often than not movie and television US Presidents are portrayed in similar ways. They are one of the good guys, but divorced from anything resembling real policy. The U.S. government does plenty to encourage Hollywood to make American propaganda but that's not what's at play here. This is just capitalism. The second you slap a donkey or elephant logo on a fictional politician half the country is going to have strong opinions about that character. No matter which way you turn you will risk alienating a lot of potential viewers.
For me this is why movie Presidents rarely seem believable. They are politicians without politics, cardboard cutouts who don't fool anyone past a second glance. But people turn to movies and television for entertainment and for most Americans being faced with the realities of our political system is going to spoil the fun.