If COVID-19 had shut down the US a week or two earlier, Matthew Quirk’s suspense-driven novel The Night Agent might never have made it to the small screen. Creator Shawn Ryan, the man behind FX’s network-defining hit The Shield, tells Tudum that it was in his very last in-person meeting before lockdown that he learned of, and subsequently devoured, the book. 

“Very quickly the pandemic started, and I had all the time in the world to read things,” he says. “I started reading the book, and I was just immediately grabbed.”

Quirk’s novel follows Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso), a low-level FBI agent tapped to man an emergency phone line in the White House that almost never rings — until it does. He’s then pulled into a massive conspiracy involving a Russian mole at the highest levels of government. Read on to learn more about how Ryan brought the book to Netflix and what he added to the tense thriller to make it work on screen. 

What is The Night Agent book about? 

Peter Sutherland, an FBI agent whose father was once suspected of spying for the Russians, finds himself on one of the least glamorous duties in all of national security: sitting in the basement of the White House next to an emergency phone that, famously, no one ever calls. But one night, someone does: a frightened young woman named Rose (played in the series by Luciane Buchanan), who tells Peter that a murder has just occurred, and that one of the victims gave her the phone number and a cryptic message: “Tell them OSPREY was right. It’s happening…” Peter thus becomes drawn into a complex conspiracy in which anyone in the White House may be a traitor.

What changes from the book The Night Agent made it into the show? 

Before 2020, Ryan had been at work for about a year on a story about the Secret Service, but hadn’t yet cracked how to shape it into a series. When The Night Agent came along, he realized he had the perfect opportunity to bring that idea to life, alongside many of the story beats from Quirk’s original novel. 

“There were so many great things in the book. It centers on Peter and Rose, but I saw a way I could combine the other thing I’d been working on independently to flesh out and expand the world,” Ryan tells Tudum. “I was intrigued by the idea that every time you see a Secret Service story, it usually involves people protecting the president. I was like, ‘I know that there are Secret Service people that don’t protect the president.’ I was really intrigued by a situation that would be considered a bad assignment in Secret Service and not very risky, that actually, ultimately turns out to be very risky and very dangerous. That was the idea I was working on.”

What does the author, Matthew Quirk, think about his novel making it to TV? 

After watching the first episode, Quirk “was gushing over how much he loved it and how happy and relieved [he was],” Ryan says. “When an author hands their book over to Hollywood, I think sometimes they just don’t know what's going to happen to it.”

How real is The Night Agent?

Ryan wanted the thriller to feel compelling and plausible, but when you’re researching a show about a plot against the United States, you end up Googling some pretty touchy subjects. “One of the lessons I’ve learned as a showrunner is always have the assistant Google the things that the federal government is going to investigate you for. I keep my hands clean in terms of that,” Ryan jokes. “But you want to Google exact floor plans of the White House, which could raise some red flags. ‘Why are these people so interested in the bottom floors of the White House? What's going on?’ We have a storyline involving this character, Omar Zadar [played by Adam Tsekhman], from an unnamed country, running for office in this country. We did a lot of research into political turmoil in different nations around the world so that we might have a good grasp of how that character might be perceived by some as a freedom fighter and by others as a terrorist.”

Then there were the practical things: “We looked into subways and how near they can get to gas lines, and explosions that could cause bigger explosions. I’m surprised an FBI agent hasn’t questioned our writer’s assistant on that. We want to tell stories that are thrilling, that are logical. [Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and director] David Mamet, who I worked with for a while on a different TV show, always used to talk about stories being surprising, but inevitable. We tried to find surprising, but inevitable things. We did a lot of research to always try to make sure that what we were talking about felt grounded and real.”

The Night Agent is now streaming on Netflix.

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