‘The Night Agent’ Boss Explains That Major Death & Reveals Early Season 4 Details

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Night Agent Season 3.]

Peter’s (Gabriel Basso) time as a night agent will continue after the events of Season 3 of the hit Netflix drama (now streaming), but maybe he’ll be taking a bit of a break before then?

That’s the decision he makes at the end of The Night Agent Season 3, though he is eager to hear what’s next when Deputy Director Aiden Mosley (Albert Jones) brings up his new partner; Catherine (Amanda Warren), who had been his point person, was killed early on in the season. And need a new partner Peter will, since Adam (David Lyons) had been working at the behest of President Hagen (Ward Horton), who, along with his wife Jenny (Jennifer Morrison), was part of the conspiracy and those in power revealed to be corrupt who were taken down in the end, thanks to journalist Isabel (Genesis Rodriguez).

Below, the show’s executive producer unpacks the biggest moments of Season 3 and teases what we could see next, should the series be renewed.

You left Peter in a more hopeful place than you have necessarily in seasons past, both when it comes to his job, but also personally with him seeing the ice cream he used to have with his mom. Why was it important for you to do that?

Shawn Ryan: First of all, you never want to repeat yourself. And I think it was important. I mean, Peter’s been through a lot these first three seasons. He’s been through a lot. He has suffered physical trauma. He suffered betrayals. He’s felt compelled to separate from Rose [Luciane Buchanan, who didn’t return in Season 3] for her safety in a way that doesn’t make him happy. He’s limping along in that scene. He’s been betrayed by a president. A lot’s going on for Peter. But I think ultimately, he sees bluer skies ahead. I’m mostly an optimistic person. I’m generally a cheerful person. I always joke that in Hollywood, the drama writers are happy and the comedy writers are depressed; I think that’s generally true. I like the idea there was some hope, that maybe there’s a way for Peter to make this whole night agent, a fulfilled life together, possible. I wanted to tease that for the audience, and that’s something that if and when we do make Season 4, we’re going to investigate in depth.

Related

'The Night Agent': Gabriel Basso Breaks Down Peter's 'Intense' Scenes With Stephen Moyer

So then speaking of that, he hasn’t stayed in touch with Rose, says it’s safe for her, and then he says that she didn’t break his heart, they just can’t be together. So now is he maybe thinking about a future where they can be if he is figuring out where he can kind of balance both parts of himself?

Well, I’d say that’s more a Season 4 question than Season 3 and we’re working at it. But those I think are generally the kinds of questions that he’s going to ask. Is there balance possible in this kind of life? That is discussed in Season 3, and I think Season 4 will partially be the exploration of whether that’s possible or not.

He’s thinking about taking a break, but he’s also already struggling with that, it seems, asking about his new partner. He’s been constantly moving since that phone rang in Season 1, he has not stopped. Is he ready for what a break from that would entail?

Listen, it’s a great question because I think ultimately, and I share this in my DNA, I don’t take a lot of breaks in my work. Like, oh, should I go to Hawaii for a month or should I try to think up a new TV show? I’m thinking up a new TV show. [Laughs] That’s just the way I live. And my wife sometimes questions that. But in those rare times where I’ve been forced to take a break, for instance, we had a couple of years ago, I was kind of miserable during it. One of the things that we’ve talked about in the writers’ room is that I think Peter’s a little bit afraid of getting off the carousel ride and what he might discover about himself if he did and that there’s a compulsion in Peter to help others because at this point in the show, he’s unclear on how to help himself.

So Peter’s new partner, my first thought was Chelsea (Fola Evans-Akingbola), but then the life she’s building with Theo (Zach Appelman) may not make Night Action the right place for her. So what can you say about his new partner?

Again, that’s a Season 4 question. I don’t mean to be coy. I do know the answer to that, but I’m not going to give it to you today. There is a plan in place. It’s a character we’ve never met before.

So then Chelsea isn’t in a place at the end of Season 3 where she would be considering something that would kind of take her away from Theo in that way?

No. And she’s Secret Service, not that somebody from Secret Service can’t become a night agent, but I think we gave Chelsea a lovely ending in Season 3. I don’t know that that’s an ending for the entire show, but I’m satisfied at the moment on how that ends. I assume that that wedding is happening and it’s lovely, and I’m assuming that there are kids coming down the pike for them. We’ll see if Chelsea makes another appearance in the show at some point, but that felt like one of our better cherry on top of the sundae moments. I’m glad Chelsea, for everything she’s been through in the three seasons, is getting her wedding.

Why kill off Catherine?

There’s no simple reason for it, and it wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly. And it should be said that we love Amanda Warren, who plays the role. We love her as a person. Spent a lot of time in New York with her as we were working. We talked about creatively, listen, it’s a political thriller. Not everyone’s going to survive. It’s not like you’re spinning lottery balls, oh, it’s Catherine’s turn to die. Of all the different creative angles that we considered, we liked the angle of Peter having to step up into more and more leadership shoes and the loss of Catherine and the way that that would fuel that ultimately was the best creative thing.

Christopher Saunders/Netflix

It is essentially what I explained to Amanda when I called because we had to make a decision, are we using Amanda in the show or not using her in the show? And the answer was, well, we wanted to use her in the first two episodes, and that wasn’t something that had contractually been agreed to. So I had to call Amanda and explain what we wanted to do and why we were doing it. And to her credit as an actress, she totally understood the power of that storyline, what it represented for the show and for Peter, and she embraced and just played the hell out of the role of Catherine in those first two episodes. And I was there. I’m not present for a lot of filming on the show because I’m pulled in too many different directions, but I was present for the filming of that scene. I really thanked her afterwards for everything she’d done on the show.

But I think it propelled Peter into a place that we hadn’t seen him where he couldn’t just sort of go to Catherine and ask, well, what do I do now? He has to continue to evolve. If we track his course as a night agent from a guy who’s just answering phones for night agents to and unofficial sort of de facto kind of semi night agent in Season 1 to official night agent, but who’s a rookie who doesn’t know the ropes, who’s making mistakes, to now he’s becoming more and more competent and more and more self-sufficient, I think Catherine’s death really helped us tell that story.

What had you wanted to do with those great scenes between Peter and The Father (Stephen Moyer) in Episode 8, and how honest was Peter being in those scenes? It feels like it was kind of something that he needed for himself in a way.

First of all, let me say that Episode 8 might be our best episode of the entire series in my opinion. I think definitively it’s the best acting work Gabriel has done on the show. I think the scenes with him and Stephen Moyer are magnetic. I think the scenes with Peter and Callum [Vinson] who plays the sun are otherworldly. I don’t know how many 10 year olds in the world could have played a scene like that the way Callum did. I’m extraordinarily proud of that episode. So what I would say is about the origins creatively is we aren’t like shows like Bridgerton or Stranger Things or Emily in Paris or characters very naturally talk about their feelings a lot. Peter, like a lot of people who actually work in this kind of line of work, tend to hold things in more, and yet there is an appetite and there are moments where you really do access Peter emotionally that I think are very effective.

But in the writers’ room, we talked about, is there a way to kind of grant the audience a little bit more access to what Peter is truly feeling and truly going through? And we came upon this idea of being captured by The Father being put on this psychedelic drug. And by the way, that drug is a real thing. We did a ton of research into that. It’s not necessarily truth serum, but it slowly chips away at your defense mechanisms about the things that you want answered. I would argue that an audience can reasonably believe that all these things that Peter says are true, are what he is really feeling. And it was a way for us to sort of access Peter and his fears in a way that we haven’t done before.

Courtesy of Netflix

And what I really loved about Gabriel’s performance in it was how he in the moment says something and is kind of horrified that that inner thought has been unleashed into the world. These are things he would normally censor, and you can see the sort of guilt that he still has, the responsibility that he feels to protect the Isabels and the Jays and the Roses of the world. And I think in the writers’ room, we’ve discussed — and it’s something that in the Season 4 writers’ room that we discuss — why does Peter care so much about helping people? I think one of the psychological reasons is because he’s had difficulty learning how to help himself, and this is a manifestation of all that.

And so what I like about making a political thriller as a TV show as opposed to a two-hour movie like the Bourne movie, is that I think you can build to scenes like these and you can have a whole history with a character before you get those revelations. So I’m just really proud of that episode, Hiromi Kamata, who directed it, just did a fabulous job with it. And kudos in particular to Gabriel and to Stephen Moyer, to Callum, and then even the B stories in that episode, the scenes with Adam and Monroe [Louis Herthum], where Monroe dies at the end. That’s why I’m really proud to work in serialized TV when you can build all this stuff, build to an episode like that and have these things pay off, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I think that’s what makes serialized television so intoxicating for viewers.

What can you say about the chances of a fourth season?

Well, to borrow a phrase that people sometimes use in the government, I work at the pleasure of Sony and Netflix. They love the show. The show’s been successful through its first two seasons on Netflix. Season 3 is about to come out. They have enough confidence and faith in us that we’ve been working for a few months now on a writers’ room for Season 4, working on episodes. They will determine if and when is the right time to pick up a Season 4. But what I will say is the reason why they do it this way is they really do care about their viewers. They want as little time between seasons as possible for the viewers. So by allowing us to be working on these scripts, to be working on the storylines, it means that the moment that they officially pick up the show, if and when they do, we’ll be ready to move really quickly, which means less time between the premiere of Season 3 and a potential premiere of Season 4.

What can you say about what we’d see in a Season 4?

We are deciding that. In the moment, we’ve written the first three scripts, but if history is a guide, sometimes we’ll get to Episode 7 or 8 and we’ll discover things that make us go back and change things in the first few scripts. I think that’s one reason why our show works is that it’s very tightly plotted and we allow ourselves enough time to finish writing Episode 10, but allow us time to go back and change things before that to make sure it all holds together. So there are things that I certainly believe are true about Season 4, but my experience tells me that I might discover things that change those beliefs. So I think it’d be irresponsible for me to declare anything definitively about a Season 4 that’s not even officially picked up yet. But we are working on it. I’m really excited about it. We’ve got great new characters that you’ve never seen before. We’ve got Peter in a world you haven’t seen before, and I’m excited.

The Night Agent, Seasons 1-3, Streaming Now, Netflix