Television series

The Night Manager

A hotel concierge with a conscience gets recruited to bring down the world's most charming arms dealer, and the whole thing unfolds like a glossy fever dream of yachts, ballgowns and quiet menace. Six hour-long episodes, gorgeous locations, and Hugh Laurie playing warmth as a weapon. It's espionage as seduction — for anyone who wants their thriller to look this good while it ruins someone.

TVMaze rating8.1

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy2011

Same le Carré DNA, distilled into two hours of paranoia and grey overcoats — Gary Oldman's Smiley is the cerebral cousin to Hiddleston's Pine, all stillness and buried grief, proving that spy fiction doesn't need gunfights to feel dangerous.

But The plot is deliberately opaque and rewards patience more than momentum — no seduction, no sunshine, just cold rooms and half-sentences.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy poster

The Little Drummer Girl2018

Another le Carré adaptation, this time drenched in 1970s colour and Park Chan-wook's woozy visual style, with a heroine recruited into a much stranger kind of infiltration — theatre as tradecraft.

But Slower and more theatrical than Night Manager's slick momentum; some find its dreamlike pacing frustrating rather than hypnotic.

The Little Drummer Girl poster

Slow Horses2022

Spies, but shabby and funny and constantly failing upward — Gary Oldman again, this time as a flatulent disgrace running MI5's reject pile, in a series that treats espionage as farce with real stakes underneath.

But The tone is scruffier and more comic than Night Manager's polish, so if you came for glamour, this will feel deliberately unglamorous.

Slow Horses poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold1965

Same author as The Night Manager, adapted decades earlier — a spy story stripped of every glamorous instinct Night Manager indulges, showing what le Carré's world looks like without the gloss.

Richard Burton at his most exhausted, in a black-and-white Cold War thriller that treats espionage as grinding, morally corrosive labour rather than seduction — the bleak ancestor of everything Night Manager makes beautiful.

But It's deliberately joyless and shot in stark monochrome; anyone hoping for Night Manager's warmth or visual pleasure will find this a cold shower.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold poster
More like this (7)

Killing Eve2018

A different kind of dangerous seduction — an intelligence operative and the assassin she's obsessed with circle each other across gorgeous European cities, with the same electric charge between hunter and prey that powers Pine and Roper.

But It gets stranger and more uneven as it goes, and the later seasons divide people who loved the first.

Killing Eve poster

The Americans2013

Deep-cover spies raising a family in suburban America, playing the long infiltration game for years rather than weeks — the tension is quieter but it accumulates into something devastating.

But It's a slow burn across six seasons; nothing here moves at Night Manager's brisk, glossy pace.

The Americans poster

Bodyguard2018

Same production world, same appetite for a charismatic operator whose loyalties keep shifting under pressure, but transplanted into Westminster politics with a lead performance from Richard Madden that's all coiled nerves.

But It's shorter and twistier, closer to a pulpy thriller than le Carré's patient moral chess.

Bodyguard poster

McMafia2018no page yet

Follows a similarly reluctant insider drawn into the family business of organised crime across glamorous international settings — money laundering instead of arms dealing, but the same slow corruption of a decent man.

But Reviews were far more mixed than Night Manager's, and the ending left a lot of viewers cold.

A Most Wanted Man2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman's final film, and another le Carré story about an intelligence operative running a dangerous asset in the shadows — quieter, sadder, and preoccupied with the cost of doing this work.

But It's a much more downbeat, procedural watch, with none of Night Manager's visual glamour or romantic charge.

A Most Wanted Man poster

The Constant Gardener2005

Ralph Fiennes as a grieving diplomat uncovering a pharmaceutical conspiracy — another le Carré story about ordinary people up against corporate and institutional rot, shot with the same eye for beautiful, complicit locations.

But It's grief-driven and mournful rather than tense, so don't expect much of Night Manager's cat-and-mouse energy here.

The Constant Gardener poster

Donnie Brasco1997

Same structural engine as Night Manager — an outsider embedding himself inside a criminal inner circle and slowly losing track of which loyalty is real — swapped from arms dealing into the Mafia.

Johnny Depp's undercover FBI agent gets dangerously close to Al Pacino's ageing mobster, and the film is less about the sting than the erosion of a man's sense of self while he pretends to belong.

But It's a grittier, more downbeat 90s crime drama with none of Night Manager's international glamour or romantic subplot.

Donnie Brasco poster

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