John le Carré's 'The Night Manager' checks into the 21st century

One secret all good spy dramas share is that they tell stories both universal and utterly specific.

FX's The Americans could be set only in the 1980s, when the end of the Cold War was closer than its Russian sleeper agents imagined, and in Showtime's Homeland, the most recent, Syria-focused season was contemporary to the point of prescience.

AMC's Turn: Washington's Spies, which returns April 25 for a third season, is as much about life in Revolutionary War America as it is about the small group of people who practiced espionage in the cause of independence.

Time can't stand still for even legendary spy novelist John le Carré, whose 1993 post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager, gets an update in the six-part adaptation premiering at 10 p.m. Tuesday on AMC.

It doesn't hurt a bit.

Tom Hiddleston (Thor, I Saw the Light) stars as Jonathan Pine, a British soldier-turned-hotelier who enlists in a plot to take down Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie, House), a charismatic Brit who has secretly made his billions in the international arms trade.

Pine's reasons for going after "the worst man in the world" are as personal as they are political, but the issue of who does - and doesn't - want Roper exposed lies at the heart of The Night Manager, which is no less cynical about British intelligence than le Carré's original.

And no less hopeful that a few good guys remain.

Including one who's now a woman.

Moving The Night Manager into the 21st century involved more than shifting the focus of Roper's activities from South American drug cartels to the Middle East and crafting a different ending.

With the blessing of le Carré, Leonard Burr, the midlevel British intelligence officer who is Pine's handler, has become Angela Burr (Olivia Colman, Broadchurch).

The switch, originally intended merely to reflect one of the ways the world has changed, became more interesting when Colman, in her first meeting with producers, revealed that she was pregnant and that, by the time filming began, she would be very noticeably so.

Instead of hiring someone else - or sticking her behind a sofa for most of the shoot - they decided to just go with it.

What's lovely about this is that most of the time, it doesn't matter. With the exception of one memorable speech in which she gets to explain why getting Roper is important enough to keep her from home, Burr's just another woman with a tough job, going about the business of trying to keep one person alive while growing another one inside her.

Colman is, not surprisingly, wonderful. Her Burr is decent, but far from transparent, and I'd like to think she and le Carré's Leonard Burr would have gotten along.

Hiddleston is appropriately enigmatic as Pine, who's required to shed more than one identity in the course of the series in order to position himself inside Roper's operation.

It's hard now to read the book and not hear Laurie's voice in Roper - though, as he told reporters in January, he'd once hoped to play Pine.

When the book was published, "I was three chapters in, and I tried to option [the rights for] it. I never optioned anything in my life before or since," he said. "But that's how compelling, how romantic, and how powerful I found this story to be."

Hiddleston's character, a man who by necessity must keep a great deal to himself, might not have been nearly as much fun for Laurie. Roper is a villain to whose charm even Pine, who knows the worst of him, doesn't seem entirely immune.

Tom Hollander is terrific as Roper's second-in-command, Corcoran, an alcoholic, but one whose bleary eyes see more than Roper does at times.

Fans of the book may be surprised by the turns the adaptation takes in later episodes, but the author himself reportedly remains unfazed.

Executive producer Simon Cornwell, whose father, David Cornwell, is John le Carré, told reporters that the writer was "quite closely involved" in the adaptation, written by David Farr.

"We were looking for something which in lots of ways as an adaptation was quite radical. We moved the time. We moved the place, and we changed one of the three or four leading characters in the story from a man to a woman," Cornwell said.

"At the same time, I think le Carré also feels that we did achieve something that is very true to the book, and from my point of view, having worked now on four or five le Carré adaptations, this is probably the one that is most radical in terms of the differences to the book on a superficial level, but at a deeper level . . . the truest of them all."

graye@phillynews.com
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