Conceived and overseen by the capable Shawn Ryan, “The Night Agent” is a binge-beckoning treat of a conspiracy thriller. When a journeyman FBI agent, answering phones from super-secret “night agents,” responds to a plea for help from an innocent bystander, he and she both are swept up into a murky, high-stakes plot worthy of the ancient Robert Ludlum. And the comparison is apt, for The Night Agent, like the Ludlum books, pounds relentlessly through one crisis or battle or revelation towards a truly cataclysmic finale, over the distance of ten wonderfully paced episodes. The core actors of Gabriel Basso, Luciane Buchanan, Fola Evans-Akingbola, Sarah Desjardins, and Hong Chau offer little charisma but slot soundly into their hectic roles without ever becoming mere plot runners. The dialogue is solid in service of the plot, action scenes are excellent, and the plot drags you along (as long as you do not interrogate it, but hey, that was equally true with Robert Ludlum). The Night Agent is a series that is hard to watch without binging and although the storyline degrades a tad toward the end, it represents one of the classier Netflix thrillers among its many such offerings.
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