Matthew Quirk’s 2019 novel, The Night Agent, is a diverting if somewhat pedestrian spy thriller with many of the tropes that genre fans expect: dangerous secrets, assassination plots, a mole in the White House, an all-too-familiar trust-no-one mentality. The first season of the Netflix series adaptation, created by The Shield’s Shawn Ryan and starring Hillbilly Elegy’s Gabriel Basso, retained the story’s best bits and added new elements that sharpened and improved it; it made the list of our favorite adaptations of 2023. The second season, which premieres Jan. 23, heads into new territory, but it’s a much blander affair.

In Quirk’s book, Peter Sutherland is a surveillance specialist whose job is to monitor a single phone line at the White House, waiting for agents to call him with coded messages. One fateful day, he receives a frantic call from a woman named Rose Larkin, whose aunt and uncle, both undercover spies, have been targeted by gun-wielding killers. Soon, he and Rose become entangled in a conspiracy that involves the Russians and major players in the U.S. government.

The first season of the streaming series kept this basic set-up, but the conspiracy was somewhat different and didn’t involve the Russians at all. The U.S. president’s chief of staff (wonderfully played by Hong Chau) played a major role in the show, but so did Vice President Redfield and his daughter, Maddie (Yellowjackets’ Sarah Desjardins), as well as Secret Service agent Chelsea Arrington (Siren’s Fola Evans-Akingbola)—none of them characters even mentioned in the book. The show also introduced two new assassins, including Ellen (The 100’s Eve Harlow), whose unstable personality generated plenty of suspense from scene to scene. While the book features a cyberattack on a Metro train, the show inserted a much more lively and frightening Metro bombing. Such changes made the first season a complex, knotty thriller that moved briskly along, in contrast with the more predictable source material.

Unfortunately, the show’s second season, which moves far beyond the events of the novel, lacks much of what made the first season so great. Many of the best actors are gone, including Chau, Desjardins, and Harlow; Evans-Akingbola appears in just a single scene. Instead, viewers are stuck with Basso, who plays Peter, and Luciane Buchanan as Rose. While excellent during the show’s numerous chases and fight scenes, they’re somewhat less magnetic when standing around talking about their troubled romantic relationship.

A few new additions to the cast are entertaining, including Dickinson’s Amanda Warren as Peter’s gruff handler, Catherine Weaver, and The L Word: Generation Q’s Arienne Mandi as Noor, an anxious diplomatic assistant for the Iranian government. X’s Brittany Snow is also great in her rare appearances as Alice, an uncharacteristically upbeat U.S. operative. The show also makes fine use of its New York City setting, including a lively (and geographically accurate) chase through Manhattan’s Chinatown. But it’s all wasted on a rote story in which Peter, as a newly minted agent for the U.S. government’s supersecret Night Action division, continually disobeys orders to pursue a straightforward investigation into a potentially world-changing threat. The ending leaves things open for a third season, which will likely return the action to the Washington, D.C., area; hopefully, it will also return the show to its past strengths. If not, viewers may decline to accept future missions.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.