The Night Manager

This masterpiece shows where TV series shine and where features fail. A Carré story in the format of a 1.5hour or even 3 hour movie would just have to take so many shortcuts that it will inevitably hurt the story. This well paced production captures all the mystery and action of the original material and perhaps even surpasses it.

Nonetheless the Golden Globe awards including Tom Hiddleston (Best Actor), Hugh Laurie (Supporting Actor) and Olivia Colman (Supporting Actress) are all well deserved as is the formidable pitch perfect performance of Tom Hollander. How magnificent Hugh Laurie is in a less expected role, and Hiddleston as the very suave man he just is, or plays. Go watch this.

With the cast in this little series, nothing could go wrong. I guess it could, but it didn't.

Great story, and it captured my interest so much I had to watch it properly instead of having it as just some background entertainment while doing other things.

It's like a nice short story where the viewer is dragged in slowly, and ends in a climax. The last episode is definitely a highlight, where some are really slow.

If I could I'd probably give it an 8.5/10, but since that's not an option I went up instead. A 9 it is then!

The Night Manager really is one of the better mini-series that you'll ever see! It will draw you in from the first episode and keep you captivated and on the edge of your seat throughout each episode! This show won a bunch of awards including Tom Hiddleston (Best Actor), Hugh Laurie (Supporting Actor) and Olivia Colman (Supporting Actress) all winning Golden Globes for their performances and each one was well deserved! The rest of the cast is great too. It's also directed by an Oscar winning director in Susanne Bier. This has to be the best adaptation of John le Carre that's ever been made. If you haven't seen this yet then do yourself a favor and go watch it.

This is a rare thing: a genuinely classy thriller. I've become so used to dodgy story lines and plots that resemble Swiss cheese that this is something of a shock. Of course, it helps that the acting is so brilliant with top performances from the likes of Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman, Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki but a great actor needs a great script. The bedrock for this classy thriller is, of course, John le Carre, supported in the adaptation by David Farr. Susanne Bier's direction is a masterclass. The cinematography is stunning.

It's become a cliché to say that they don't make them like this anymore, but they rarely do. For me, it's the finest thriller this decade.

Oh, and Tom Hiddleston would make a very Ian Fleming James Bond.

I keep coming back to le Carre though. Once upon a time thriller writers like him and Freddie Forsyth were painstaking in their attention to detail, writing plots that arose out of believable characters. There's many a TV series that could take note.

At last a good old fashioned yarn where bad guys are bad and the good guy has a moral position. A flick through the average night of TV and the schedules are filled with low-cost reality rubbish, The Night Manager breaks the mold it has a good storyline, high production values, and a great cast. More like watching a Bond movie, for example, using three million pound plus speedboats to go out to a restaurant just to get a beautifully choreographed overhead shot framed against the Med. Certainly looks and, with its intelligent script, sounds more like a big budget movie filmed on location in Europe than TV series. What more do you want for your licence fee? Forget it is reminiscent of a bygone era it is entertainment. As long as it doesn't degenerate into an overlong series with filler episodes that go nowhere I will keep watching...