The Night Agent EP Shawn Ryan Talks Quick Renewal And His Season 2 Plan

If you thought you were surprised by how quickly Netflix renewed The Night Agent for Season 2, get in line behind showrunner Shawn Ryan.

"It was so fast," Ryan marveled during a Monday morning Zoom with TVLine.

"I mean, I had been told that that we shouldn't expect any news about a pick-up until at least a month after the show started," Ryan said, referring to Netflix's well-established tendency to see how a show performs within its first 28 days of release. "And then last Tuesday morning" — four days after the D.C.-set thriller dropped its 10 episodes — "the numbers get released and you're like, 'Oh my God.'" Even so, "I still thought that they were going to make us wait a little while."

The "numbers" Ryan refers to are Netflix's in-house Top 10 lists, which on March 28 showed that The Night Agent had landed in the Top 10 in no less than 93 countries.

"We literally got the [renewal] call the next morning," Ryan says. "It's all kind of shocking."

Yet as surprised as he was, Ryan says that Netflix had given him a heads-up — before the premiere! — that things were looking promising.

"We had a premiere screening the Monday before the show dropped on Thursday, and they were already acting like it was a hit," he recalls. "They have the ability to see how their trailers are doing in terms of views, and for a while ours were indexing extraordinarily high. They also can see how many people are putting the show on their Watch List."

Having been in this mercurial business for a while, Ryan (whose past credits include The Shield, Terriers and S.W.A.T.) was inclined to block out the good buzz.

"I almost got like, upset, where I was like, 'Don't jinx this!'" he relates with a chuckle. "'You are going to hugely disappoint me when the show doesn't do well!"

The Night Agent did do well, though, and with its speedy reunion comes big questions for fans of the series. Read on to see what Shawn Ryan knows, at this very early juncture, about the Season 2 storyline and how soon FBI Agent Peter Sutherland's next adventure might arrive....

Based on the novel of the same name by Matthew Quirk, Season 1 of The Night Agent follows Peter Sutherland (played by Gabriel Basso), a low-level FBI Agent who works in the basement of the White House, manning a phone that never rings — until the night that it does. That urgent call, from Luciane Buchanan's Rose Larkin, propels both Peter and tech whiz Rose into a fast-moving and dangerous conspiracy that ultimately leads all the way to the Oval Office.

Author Quirk, however, has no second novel featuring FBI Agent Sutherland on which to base Season 2 of the TV series.

"He's written plenty of books, but nothing with these characters in this world," Night Agent showrunner Shawn Ryan notes. "So it's something that with the pickup we're now working on."

While admitting he wants to be "intentionally vague," Ryan continues, "I've certainly had some ideas, from the very beginning, of what we might do in a Season 2. We're still working on the ideas, and we'll have to present them to Sony and Netflix" — starting with a preliminary meeting happening the afternoon of April 3.

Will Season 2 revolve around Agent Sutherland's first mission as a bona fide Night Agent, which he embarked on in the Season 1 finale after bidding Rose a (hopefully) temporary adieu?

"I would say that that that will be the starting-off point, to sort of see what he was being sent off to do. But we have some surprises...," Ryan allows. "I don't want to say too much, because until you're actually filming it, the stories can always change."

"Now that the pickup is official, we, have a writers room that's getting going to get together to tell these stories," Night Agent showrunner Shawn Ryan tells TVLine. "As we did last year, we have ideas, we're pursuing them, and we'll change our minds along the way if we think of something better."

But if things move swiftly and smoothly enough, might cameras get rolling on Season 2 as early as this coming summer...?

"In all honesty, I'm having my first phone call at 11 o'clock today with the studio to discuss [Season 2]," Ryan told TVLine during our April 3 Zoom. "I mean, the pickup really did take me by surprise, because it was so quick, so I wanted to take the week to think about it. But the first call about the production, where will we film, and what's the potential schedule, that is going to happen in about an hour-and-a-half."

Want scoop on The Night Agent, or for any other show? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt's Inside Line.