The Night Manager

The BBC's 2016 adaptation of John le Carré's 1993 novel was the show that proved a le Carré story could be made at the scale of prestige cinema without losing its cynicism. David Farr moved the novel's Latin American arms trade to the post-Arab Spring Middle East, and Susanne Bier — the Danish director of In a Better World, and the first woman to direct a le Carré adaptation — shot it in Marrakesh, Mallorca and the Swiss Alps as a series of very beautiful, very cold rooms.

Tom Hiddleston plays Jonathan Pine, the night manager of the title, recruited to work his way into the circle of Richard Roper, an arms dealer played by Hugh Laurie with such relaxed charm that the casting reads as an argument about how such men actually operate. Olivia Colman is Angela Burr, the intelligence officer running him from a small office with almost no institutional support; Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki complete a cast that was, in 2016, an unusually strong bench for British television.

It won two Emmys, including Outstanding Directing for Bier, three Golden Globes and three BAFTAs, and effectively set the template for the decade of glossy British spy drama that followed. A second series, directed by Georgi Banks-Davies, arrived on BBC One in January 2026 with Hiddleston and Colman returning — nearly ten years later, which is roughly the gap le Carré's own sequels tended to leave.