Hiddleston (The Avengers, The Hollow Crown), plays Jonathan Pine, a British soldier who, after serving two tours in the Middle East, is enjoying the quiet life, mostly, as a night manager in the hotel industry. When the series starts, he heads the night crew at the Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo, Egypt. It also just happens to be during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. While chaos surrounds the Nefertiti, Pine shows his prowess in his position as he calms down the guests and helps them with their various problems.
At the height of the revolution, Pine meets Sophie Alekan (Aure Atika, World Without End), a woman being put up in the hotel by the scion of a major family in Cairo. When Sophie gets a hold of documents that clearly show a massive arms deal, she asks him to hold onto them and release them if something happens to her. Let's just say, things don't go all that well for Sophie, whom Jonathan has quickly fallen for.
Fast-forward several years later. Pine has changed locations, but not professions. Now the night manager in a secluded hotel in Switzerland, Pine does whatever he can to get away from his memories of Cairo and Sophie. Unfortunately, Jonathan's life gets turned upside down once again when some guests arrive, headed by a man known as Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie, House, Tomorrowland). Pine knows Roper's name very well. It was his name that was attached to the arms deal that lead to Sophie's end, and while Pine tries to play it cool, his desire for revenge starts to build.
Jonathan joins forces with a British agency known as the International Enforcement Agency. It isn't a big group; in fact, it primarily consists of a woman named Angela Burr (Olivia Colman, Locke), her employee, Rob Singhal (Adeel Akhtar, The Dictator) and their boss, Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge, 2010's Robin Hood), but what the IEA does have is a strong desire to find and take down Roper. With their help, as well as the help of an American intelligence officer, Joel Steadman (David Harewood, 24, Supergirl), Pine starts the job of infiltrating Roper's organization so that he can get the inside scoop on another deal and help the IEA take Roper down once and for all.
While his plan to gain Roper's trust seems to be off to a good start, what he doesn't count on is the overly suspicious Major Lance "Corky" Corkoran (Tom Hollander, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End), and Roper's girlfriend, Jed (Elizabeth Debicki, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Great Gatsby), a woman that Pine can't help but to start to fall in love with.
The show's dense six episodes really lets the relationships between the different characters build up a lot. Viewers will quickly come to see Roper as the villain that he is, but Pine isn't exactly a white knight himself, especially considering some of the lines he is willing to cross in order to get what he wants. While Corky's constant suspicion of Pine will have the two butting heads frequently, the fact that Corky has Roper's ear means that Corky is more than just a mild nuisance and could easily be a major threat to Pine's plans. All this coupled with Jed as the forbidden fruit means that The Night Manager has pretty much everything you want in a spy-thriller.
While The Night Manager doesn't come with any extras, the Uncensored Edition does feature a good bit of casual nudity. Of course, the nature of this show in general isn't really something suitable for younger audiences, but the addition of the nudity that wasn't present during the show's original AMC run makes the mature nature of the series even more apparent.
The Night Manager was a great six-part miniseries that packed a lot of content into each episode. I highly recommend this series to anyone interested in the spy genre. Hiddleston and Laurie play off of each other spectacularly and make me want to see the two actors in more performances together.
