By: Alex Tilton

I’d been having a very good run with these reviews for a while. Not all of them were entirely positive but it felt like it’d been a long while since I reviewed something truly god-awful. But when you experiment with something new, sometimes the experiment fails. Such was the case when my wife and I sat down to watch The Night Agent on Netflix.

She was sick to death of sitcoms but also didn’t want anything depressing or overly dark. The action genre seemed the obvious choice. I’d heard the name ‘The Night Agent’ but I’d never seen any of it. Looking at the cover art, it seemed to be a bog-standard action thriller about secret agents. It wasn’t something I wanted to watch, but it seemed like it would be decent enough. 

Sigh…

They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. That’s what I did, and that’s exactly what happened.

The Night Agent is without any doubt the most stilted, awful, badly acted, terribly written, cheesy, pretentious, unbelievable, predictable, badly directed thing that I’ve seen in the last five years. It feels like a high school student’s Jason Bourne fanfiction project. It contains zero redeeming qualities and should not be watched by anyone. The nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say about it is that it’s good to put on as background noise while you’re cooking. 

I wonder how the actors felt during filming. Did they curse the writers for writing such relentlessly crappy dialogue? Did they curse the author of the original books for writing a story built entirely out of cringy cliches and convenient coincidences? Or did they curse humanity in general for rewarding this kind of crap by paying money for it?

I know that only A-list actors can afford to pick and choose what they’ll be in, and everyone else must take whatever work they can find. But did anyone’s career benefit from this? I watched 3 episodes before I couldn’t stomach anymore and shut it off. Based on what I saw, if I were producing a TV show, I wouldn’t hire anyone involved with The Night Agent. The writers couldn’t write, the director couldn’t direct and the actors were so wooden I thought they were going to sprout leaves.

They also took the easy way out with female characters by way of the oldest, cheapest trick in the book. Most of the authority figures in the background of the story are women; the President, her chief of staff, the person they’re trying to save, and one of the assassins trying to kill her. But a background character is a background character regardless of their job title. The main character (Peter) who does all on screen action stuff is a man. 

Moreover, he is impossibly, tediously, boringly clean; a wrongfully accused ultra-patriot with no flaws whatsoever. All he wants is to protect the country that treated him wrongly. There’s nothing whatsoever interesting about him, or any of the other characters. 

 The show is awful, do not waste your time.