The Night Agent EP Shawn Ryan Gets Candid About Difficult Death Decisions and Not Forcing the Heroes’ Romance

TVLINE | The Night Agent has been living comfortably in Netflix’s Top 10 charts, and was renewed just days after its release. Why do you think the series was such a hit? And were you at all surprised by the magnitude of its success?
Well, as we were making it, I felt like it was a good show. And as I was in the editing room working on it, I felt like it was an addictive show. When you work on a show, I’ve probably seen each episode at least 20 times, and when you still enjoy watching it on, you know, time 18, 19, 20, you feel like there’s something there. But I could honestly say that the initial overwhelming reaction, when those numbers came out after the first four days, was surprising to me.

As for the reasons? We tried to make a show that was different than what we saw on TV. Certainly, there are political thrillers, but I’m not sure that there are political thrillers with the underdog component to it that we had, and with the romance story between Peter and Rose. And then I think you have to say that we did a really good job casting. Gabriel has really won over a lot of people, Luciane as well…..

TVLINE | I was going to say, you don’t have many “names” per se — but maybe that helped in a way?
I think it did help. Now I don’t know that doing that at every outlet would’ve worked, but I always felt like Netflix had the ability to take things that didn’t have the traditional “big stars” in them and offer them up to a wide community. I’ve seen shows really succeed on Netflix without big stars, and that’s one of the reasons why I targeted Netflix when we were selling this show. When I talk to them, they weren’t afraid of discovering a Peter, of discovering a Rose. Even with Diane Farr — Hong Chau is a bigger name now, but when we cast her she wasn’t as known as she was after [her Oscar nomination for The Whale].

TVLINE | Hong Chau was huge in this. Magnetic in every “f–king” scene — as Diane would say.
[Laughs] Yeah. So, I think it just seems like the right story with the right people. I think it seems fresh because we haven’t seen all these actors in everything for the last 15 years, so people buy [Gabriel and Luciane] as Peter and Rose. There’s a great hook at the center of the book that we were able to transport over the show, and I’d like to think that just on an execution level, we did a good job making the show. And then, you know, word of mouth gets around.

You know, Netflix doesn’t traditionally have the biggest marketing budgets, but they have their homepage and they have ways of making sure that their subscribers are aware of these things. But the surprising thing was that they had an idea [of its success] before I did, because we had a premiere screening on the Monday before the show dropped on Thursday, and they were already acting like it was a hit. They can see how their trailers are doing in terms of views, and for a while our trailers were indexing extraordinarily high. They also can see how many people are putting the show on their Watch List. At that Monday premiere, I almost got, like, upset, where I was like, “Don’t jinx us!” But clearly they knew something and it was one of those kismet times I’ve been part of a few times in my career — with the right story, the right actors, and the right network at the right time.

TVLINE | You’ve spoken elsewhere about how you changed up the assassins. Was there any other element from the book that you meaningful tweaked, or maybe set aside for a rainy day?
I wouldn’t say “set aside,” but in the book the president [of the United States] is a man and the vice president is not really a character. I think that in the book the president’s name is Michael Travers, and we changed that to Michelle (played by Kari Matchett) and made her and Diane Farr college friends that went way back, so that there’s a personal element to their story more than just professional.

As for Maddie and her father (played by Yellowjackets‘ Sarah Desjardins and Paper Girls‘ Christopher Shyer), that was something that we changed around because we really wanted to dive into this completely horrible father who’s the vice president. And it just felt like, “OK, well, if we have the guy as the vice president, maybe it will be interesting to have a female president then.”

TVLINE | Was there any death or non-death that was kind of a “coin toss” at the end, that you were wavering on?
Oh, man…. There was a lot of debate about who should go first, Dale (The Heights‘ Phoenix Raei) or Ellen (The 100‘s Eve Harlow), and we actually wrote some pages where it was Ellen who’s dying at the end of [Episode] 6 and Dale survives, but ultimately we came back to that. It was always a question of, “What’s the better story for Peter and Rose?” So, there was some debate about that.

TVLINE | I think that decision worked out well, since Ellen was the one who had these dreams about a better life, with Dale, and you yanked that away from her.
Yeah. Ultimately that’s where we landed, but it was a question.

I would say that there were a lot of mixed feelings about killing Erik [Monks, played by D.B. Woodside] at the end of Episode 8 — like, “Does he have to die?” And so we talked about that. We also talked about, “Does Diane Farr live or die when she gets shot in Episode 10?” We had certain things from the book that we wanted to hold to. Like, Hawkins’ death is a great twist in the book, and we preserved that for the end of Episode 2.

TVLINE | That caught me off guard only because it was Robert Patrick, and he was shaping up to be such a good adversary.
That’s the third show of mine he’s done. And he really did me a favor. I essentially just  called him up and was like, “Hey, we have this show and this role, and it’s a big surprise death, but can you come up [to Vancouver] for two weeks and film some stuff?” And he was able to fit it into his schedule. He wasn’t up there all that long but the impact on screen was pretty great. I thought. I would work with him on any show I had if he was willing to work with me.

TVLINE | I was strongly expecting Pete and Rose not to get together until like the end — like maybe even the very final scene. They save the day, they run towards each other… and then we get a first kiss. Did their hook-up instead land in the same place as in the book, on the boat?
A little bit, yeah. The boat is a thing in the book, though they get to the boat for different reasons; Peter’s not “wanted” in the book the way that he is. One of the things we knew about that romance was that we wanted to take our time, and when we started writing we thought we were heading towards a romance, but what I said is, “I’m not committing to a romance. Let’s advance their relationship across these scripts and see if we arrive in an organic place for one, but let’s not insist that we have to,” because I always feel that that’s a weakness of a lot of thriller movies where they try to shoehorn romances. I always talk about Three Days of the Condor as a classic, best example of a ‘70s political thriller, but the romance at the center of that I think is pretty bogus. Robert Redford kidnaps Faye Dunaway and ties her up, and then…?

TVLINE | A couple of weeks ago I found myself rewatching Murder at 1600, and Wesley Snipes has a female counterpart for the whole movie, played by Diane Lane, but they kept it professional.
Right. So, in this case I wanted to make sure that we earned it. You also have to be true to the “ticking clock” of the stories you’re setting up, and for people to actually take the time to look at each other and kiss and roll onto bed, you have to believe that there’s not something more important for them to do in that moment. It was about finding that moment about where, “OK, we’re just hiding right now , we’ve gone through this shared trauma together, and it’s brought us together.” We thought that was the right and appropriate time for that to happen.

TVLINE | I know it’s early goings, but what’s the plan for Season 2? Because Matthew Quirk didn’t write a second Night Agent book, did he?
He’s written plenty of books but nothing with these characters in this world, so it’s something that with the [Season 2] pickup we’re now working on. I’ve certainly had some ideas from the very beginning of what we might do in a Season 2. I’m going to be intentionally vague, because we’re still working on the ideas, and then we’ll have to present them to Sony and Netflix and…

TVLINE | Is Season 2 not necessarily about what Peter left on the jet to go do, as a Night Agent?
I would say that at the moment, that will be the starting off point for Season 2 — to sort of see what he was being sent off to do — but we have some surprises in store. I don’t want to say too much because until you’re actually filming it, the story is going to always change, but what I will say is that Netflix felt really good about the show, and so back in December they were asking me, “What are your thoughts about Season 2?,”, and I put together some thoughts and shared them. So, we have a starting off point, and now that the pickup is official we have a writer’s room that’s getting going to tell these stories. As we did last year we have ideas, we’re pursuing them, we’ll change our minds along the way if we think of something better. So it’s too premature to kind of give you [details].

TVLINE | My concern — and maybe this is a concern you also share, as a storyteller — is that Part 2s are tempted to go bigger. Everything gets bigger, and then it’s no longer scrappy Peter and scrappy Rose, everyday people caught up in a big drama. Is that something you’re cognizant of?
Sure. I would also refer to it as the “classic second album dilemma.” These bands spend all this time crafting this record, it hits big, and now the record company wants a second album right away. And all of a sudden everything’s rushed.

I will say that I think there will need to be an evolution. You know, I dealt with this once before when The Shield was a basic cable phenomenon, but I think one of the reasons why that show lasted as long as it did, as well as it did, was that I never tried to make it bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger as it went on. So, the one thing I will say is that one of the things I think was appealing in Season 1 was the idea of Peter being the least important person in the most important building in the world, and then, in a very Hitchcockian way, being an ordinary person elevated to extraordinary circumstances. I think just because he’s now a Night Agent doesn’t mean he’s the best Night Agent, it doesn’t mean he’s the most experienced Night Agent. I think there’s still a way for Peter, even in his new role, to be the underdog who’s occasionally in over his head.

TVLINE | Is there any chance you’re filming Season 2 as soon as this summer, or is that too optimistic?
In all honesty I’m having my first phone call at 11 o’clock today [April 3] with the studio to discuss all this. Really, the pickup really did take me by surprise—

TVLINE | It was so quick, man. I write about these things for a living, and that was fast. Like, Reacher/Prime Video fast.
It was so fast. I mean, I had been told that we shouldn’t expect any news about pickup until at least a month after the show started. So, when I heard over the [first] weekend that it was doing very well, and then when the sort of official numbers get released, you’re like, “Oh, my God.” But I still thought that they were going to make us wait a little while. But literally we got the call the next morning. I wanted to take the week to think about it, and the first call about the production and where will we film and the potential schedule, that preliminary call is going to happen in about an hour and a half.

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