The Night Agent EP Shawn Ryan Talks Quick Renewal and His Season 2 Plan

Matt Webb Mitovich
·2 min read
5
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

If you thought you were surprised by how quickly Netflix renewed The Night Agent for Season 2, get in line behind showrunner Shawn Ryan.

“It was so fast,” Ryan marveled during a Monday morning Zoom with TVLine.

More from TVLine

“I mean, I had been told that that we shouldn’t expect any news about a pick-up until at least a month after the show started,” Ryan said, referring to Netflix’s well-established tendency to see how a show performs within its first 28 days of release. “And then last Tuesday morning” — four days after the D.C.-set thriller dropped its 10 episodes — “the numbers get released and you’re like, ‘Oh my God.'” Even so, “I still thought that they were going to make us wait a little while.”

The “numbers” Ryan refers to are Netflix’s in-house Top 10 lists, which on March 28 showed that The Night Agent had landed in the Top 10 in no less than 93 countries.

“We literally got the [renewal] call the next morning,” Ryan says. “It’s all kind of shocking.”

Yet as surprised as he was, Ryan says that Netflix had given him a heads-up — before the premiere! — that things were looking promising.

“We had a premiere screening the Monday before the show dropped on Thursday, and they were already acting like it was a hit,” he recalls. “They have the ability to see how their trailers are doing in terms of views, and for a while ours were indexing extraordinarily high. They also can see how many people are putting the show on their Watch List.”

Having been in this mercurial business for a while, Ryan (whose past credits include The Shield, Terriers and S.W.A.T.) was inclined to block out the good buzz.

“I almost got like, upset, where I was like, ‘Don’t jinx this!'” he relates with a chuckle. “‘You are going to hugely disappoint me when the show doesn’t do well!”

The Night Agent did do well, though, and with its speedy reunion comes big questions for fans of the series. Read on to see what Shawn Ryan knows, at this very early juncture, about the Season 2 storyline and how soon FBI Agent Peter Sutherland’s next adventure might arrive….

Best of TVLine

Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter

Click here to read the full article.