Netflix has a pretty massive hit on its hands with The Night Agent. The thriller series, based on the novel by Matthew Quirk, is on pace to become one of Netflix’s biggest shows of all time, as TV fans continue to discover the story of Peter Sutherland Jr. Of course, this has brought a renewed interest in the source material, and those who have been digging into Quirk’s original book are discovering just how different the Netflix series actually is.
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The main story of the book is present in the show, with Peter, Rose, and Diane Farr serving as the main characters in both. What you may find surprising, however, is that the second major storyline of the series isn’t in the book at all. The entire plot featuring the Secret Service and the Vice President’s daughter is an original idea from series creator Shawn Ryan.
While speaking to Deadline, Ryan revealed that he had an idea for a Secret Service TV show but didn’t have enough meat on the bones to make a whole series just yet. He wound up combining that concept with the story of The Night Agent.
“I was immediately captivated by what I thought was an amazing hook, a concept and characters for a TV show,” Ryan said. “I also knew there wasn’t enough in the book to fill out a full TV season. I’d been working on my own separate idea about Secret Service people who are protecting the daughter of the Vice President while she’s at college, which I thought was an interesting change from usually protecting the President. But I didn’t have enough ideas on that front for its own TV show. I immediately saw a way I could combine this original idea I’d been working on with the main thread of the book.”
The other major change from book to screen came in the form of the assassins. In Quirk’s novel, there is a single Russian assassin working to take out Peter and Rose. For the show, Ryan turned one character into two.
“The Russian character works really well in the book; the book’s great, everyone should go out and buy it and read it. To have the sole assassin worried me,” Ryan explained. “In a book, you can put the readers into the heads of the characters and you understand what they’re thinking, why they’re behaving. In a TV show, having this sort of lone assassin just silently moving through, I thought we won’t really get to know much about that character. And in the TV/film world I’ve seen a lot of sort of Russian bad guys.”
“The two characters we call Dale and Ellen in the show, you said, a Natural Born Killers thing, we’ve referred to as a little bit of a Bonnie and Clyde thing,” he continued. “Those were characters that were part of my Secret Service idea.”
The entire first season of The Night Agent is available to stream on Netflix. The series has already been renewed for Season 2.
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