The Night Manager

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.

I missed this mini-series when it came out but recently discovered it on Blu-Ray at my public library. It is a joint project of Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie who also are two of the primary stars. It revolves around undercover, illegal weapons sales and the team trying to bust the ring.

Tom Hiddleston is former trained British military man Jonathan Pine. We encounter him working as the night manager of a hotel in a foreign country. He ultimately gets recruited into the undercover organization out of London and reports to Olivia Colman as Angela Burr.

As it develops Hugh Laurie as Richard Roper is the very wealthy big boss behind the illegal weapons sales program, the type and quantity to start a small war. As Roper states at one point, his involvement is "War as a spectator sport." He has no sides, he just sees it as a great money-making opportunity.

As key character is Elizabeth Debicki as Jed Marshall, the much younger girlfriend of Roper, but she will eventually cooperate with the good guys.

My favorite in the series is Tom Hollander (so good as the bad guy in "Hanna") as Roper's enforcer Lance Corkoran who is called Corky. He plays a dastardly character but is so good at it.

All in all a very entertaining series.

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...

In my opinion Tom Huddleston would be a great choice to take over as James Bond. This movie is a great example of how he would do in my opinion. Hopefully the 007 producers will give him serious consideration. He has shown the skills needed for the role and will easily handle the roll whether it requires seriousness action and also the times when sarcastic humor is needed.

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.