'The Night Agent' creator shares how personal loss influenced story

Creator of Netflix political thriller The Night Agent, Shawn Ryan revealed how his personal life influenced the show.

Speaking to Variety, Ryan talked about never having worked in this genre and the parallels between his real life and the series.

“I have never worked in this genre. I always thought it was reserved for movies, and television struggled in this space. My assessment was that it was hard to stack reveal and plot twist, reveal and plot twist on each other in order to make a show.”

“ The solution in my mind was to dive deeper into character. Yes, you are going to have all the things about political thrillers that appeal to you in the movies. But we could dig deeper into relationships like Peter and Rose’s.”

“And ultimately, the thing that differentiated this story for me was that my father passed away very suddenly in 2015. When my brother and I went to clean up his house, we found newspaper clippings that he had kept all these years of things that had happened he had never told me about.”

“ I was so curious about what the truth was with my father, and I was devastated I would never get to ask him these questions and get the answers.”

“ At the heart of this show, Gabriel’s character Peter has unanswered questions about his father and what the truth is. That was the real emotional center for me that made this something beyond a political thriller.”

The Night Agent is an American action thriller television series created by Shawn Ryan based on the novel of the same name by Matthew Quirk. It premiered on Netflix on March 23, 2023.

The show follows FBI Agent Peter Sutherland as he is thrown into a giant plot about a Russian mole at the highest levels of the United States government. Peter then begins search for the traitor.