‘The Night Agent’ Showrunner Shawn Ryan Reveals His Plans for Peter’s Season 4 Future: “A Lot Still Could Change”

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Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland looking serious while standing outside in The Night Agent Season 3

Published Feb 19, 2026, 9:30 AM EST

[Editor's note: The following contains major spoilers for Season 3 of The Night Agent.]

Summary

Season 3 of the Netflix TV series 'The Night Agent' reveals the origin of The Broker, humanizing and complicating the villain.
Isabel’s arc as a journalist links the finance world to global crimes and reveals her fraught tie to Jacob Monroe.
A mysterious assassin, empathic interrogation, and Peter’s moral stand escalate stakes for the Night Agent.

From creator/showrunner Shawn Ryan, Season 3 of the Netflix series The Night Agent saw Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) track down Treasury Agent Jay Batra (Suraj Sharma), who fled with sensitive government intel after killing his boss, learn more details about just how deeply involved The Broker (Louis Herthum) is in so many things, and how a persistent journalist (Genesis Rodriguez) fits into it all. On top of all that, Peter also found himself facing off against a mysterious unnamed assassin (Stephen Moyer) whose too-smart-for-his-own-good son keeps letting his curiosity put him in danger. But there are only so many secrets Peter can uncover about powerful people before the consequences threaten to end him and keep him from that work-life balance he’s looking to find.

Collider recently got the opportunity to chat one-on-one with Ryan about all the twists, shocking moments, and surprising deaths in Season 3. During the interview, he discussed the development of The Broker, introducing the character of Isabel before letting viewers in on her connection to the world of the series, keeping the assassin a mysterious figure, which episode was his favorite of the season, making real-life parallels with the presidential storyline, how they ultimately decided the fate of Catherine Weaver (Amanda Warren), the fight scene he’s most proud of, and the plan he has for a possible Season 4.

The Broker, Aka Jacob Monroe, Has Evolved Over the Seasons of ‘The Night Agent’

"He does things that objectively seem plainly evil."

Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland sitting next to Louis Herthum as The Broker in The Night Agent Season 3

Collider: This season is about The Broker. We learn who he is, his history and everything he’s been doing, and we have a much bigger sense of who he is. After building up that character last season, have you always known how he plays into things and who he is, or has he been evolving along the way?

SHAWN RYAN: The dirty little secret to all TV shows is that we don’t know exactly where it’s going at all times. Anyone that tells you that they do, I really question, and I think that they box themselves in on. One of the great things about television, and I can’t think of another art form that's like this, is that it's still ongoing in its creation while an audience is enjoying it. When you write a book, that book is the book for the rest of your life. When you make a movie, that’s the movie. Maybe you’ll release a director’s cut two years later that’s slightly different. But for the most part, you’re releasing art that’s finalized, and you just watch how the world interacts with it. An ongoing TV show, people will watch the first season as you’re making a second season, and you can see what an actor brings to a role.

I think this character of Monroe has really evolved in conjunction with us watching Louis Herthum play him. We just enjoyed him so much and found him more and more intriguing, so we thought about how wide we could make the bandwidth for how we understand this character. He does things that objectively seem plainly evil. Why would somebody really become like that? How could somebody come to be like that? We challenge ourselves, and all the credit goes to the writers that I work with. I feel like we showed you a full picture of Jacob Monroe. We gave you an origin story in Season 3, and seeing how he was on the other end of these extortionist tactics early in his life and how they molded him into who he was and how he’s really a creation of the U.S. government that he’s become a bugaboo for in these seasons, I really like that. We’re always looking for ways to complicate our heroes and humanize our villains.

It was an interesting piece to his puzzle to introduce us to Isabel and let us get to know her this season before you revealed who she really is. It actually gives us, as the viewer, time to know her and like her and maybe even trust her a bit before you give us this other piece that could do the opposite of that. Was that part of the idea behind doing that? What did you want from that character?

RYAN: She had a legitimate reason for being part of the story, which was through the financial angle of all this. I was really intrigued with exploring the culpability of financial institutions in the ongoing evils of things in the world. We put those words essentially in Isabel’s mouth, near the end of episode three, when she says, “Just imagine the most awful things in the world – human trafficking, sex trafficking, drug running, arms dealing. None of this stuff would really be possible in its current form without the cooperation of financial institutions, and those people almost never pay a price for it.” I was really interested in that. I was interested in meeting Monroe’s adult daughter but not knowing right away that she was his daughter.

In retrospect, it’s obvious why she’s involved in this case, because she’s trying to learn the truth about her father, much in the same way that Peter, in the first couple of seasons of the show, was trying to learn about his father. As you said, we get to know her as a person before we view her in the context of being Monroe’s daughter, but we certainly did try to put clues in there. In episode four, she talks about how she doesn’t know how she feels about her father. He has money, and he’s used it to buy things for her, and she’s allowed him to buy things for her, but she has mixed feelings. I think the clues are there. I was proud of how our team pulled that off, and then there’s the reveal. And then, once you do know it’s her father, you expect not to trust her at all. But then, you come to realize that she’s probably less of a fan of her father than Peter.

Gabriel Basso as Peter, Amanda Warren as Catherine and Albert Jones as Mosley in The Night Agent

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Shawn Ryan delivers a tighter, more focused season that feels completely sure of itself — and easily the strongest the series has produced so far.

Stephen Moyer’s character is also quite interesting because he’s running around as this assassin without us knowing why or who he works for. We don’t really know much of anything about him. Did you intentionally want to keep that character more of a mystery, as a villain? Is he more interesting, the less you know about him?

RYAN: We were interested in a guy living in a very bifurcated world. People can be two seemingly contradicting things at the same time. He can be a ruthless killer and also be a doting father who really cares about the education and the morality of his son. There wasn’t as much room in this season to do a deep dive into his origin story in the way that we did for Monroe, and so having made that decision, I think there was a level of, yes, let’s keep a certain mystery. He’s obviously truly brilliant and smart and intelligent. What we always like is to show characters who have certain codes that they believe in. It might not be a code that we believe in, but we understand that they’re true to their code.

He is a killer for higher. We come to understand that, in this case, Freya is his employer for this particular job, but not his full-time employer, and he’s trying to keep this world with his son separate. The problem is that he’s created his own problem because he’s helped educate a young child who’s so smart and acquisitive and curious that the data points of the story he’s telling don’t hold together. The son has grown smart enough to see the flaws in his father’s stories. We really liked that idea. We liked that there are aspects that you don’t know about them, including their names. They can exist in this D&D playing, almost alternate reality, until the father goes away to wreak havoc on the world.

Seeing the Assassin Force the Truth out of Peter Sutherland Was a Stand-Out Moment in Season 3 of ‘The Night Agent’

"That's really one of my favorite episodes of the entire series."

Stephen Moyer as the assassin kneeling next to a sitting Gabriel Basso as Peter in The Night Agent Season 3

The back and forth between the assassin and Peter is so interesting to watch, later in the season, when he captures Peter and he’s forcing him to talk to him. What was it like to figure out how that dynamic would play out? There’s such an interesting balance throughout all of that, with what Peter tells him and the trust that Peter builds with his son and how he’s able to leverage that. That was such an interesting way to play with all of that.

RYAN: I’m glad you liked that. That’s really one of my favorite episodes of the entire series. And those scenes, in particular, are my favorite scenes in the episode. I would say that I think it’s the best acting work Gabriel [Basso] has done on the show in all three seasons. Our show is different from Bridgerton and Emily in Paris and even Stranger Things, where you have characters who naturally want to talk about their feelings a lot. There’s an openness there. We have this alpha male guy who is reticent to talk about his feelings, which I think is very emotionally true. He’s a true representative of a lot of people who work in areas like law enforcement, the military, and secret forces, where they’re just trying to do the right thing, and the things that bother them, they tend to keep bottled up inside them.

But to your point, an audience wants to access your main characters, and they want to know what’s going on in their brains, and they want to know what they’re really feeling in those moments. We talked about, “Are there ways to access Peter and get him to open up more than he might naturally want to?” And that led to the storyline and the plot points with this carefully researched drug that we did do a lot of research on. That’s all true about that drug, to get Peter to say things out loud that he’s been thinking but hasn’t dared say out loud. We really loved that. Those scenes were a highlight.

And then, when we talked to Stephen about playing his side of that with The Father, he’s totally in control, and he doesn’t need to be evil or mean. There’s a gentleness and empathy, at times, with the way that he talks to Peter. It’s a strategy because it’s the most effective way to get Peter to tell them the things that he wants to know, but it becomes a very atypical interrogation. We’re used to the torture scenes of, “Tell me what you want, or I’m going to make you hurt in unimaginable ways.” In this case, it’s almost scarier for Peter because he’s saying these things out loud that he doesn’t really want to say, but the places in his brain that usually block him from saying them are lessened in those moments. It’s a different kind of torture for Peter. It’s an empathetic torture. It’s a psychological torture. Credit goes to our writers and our director, Hiromi Kamata, and our actors.

When the son comes in, Callum [Vinson] is so good as this precocious 10-year-old. I don’t know what the future holds for Callum. We’ve seen people like Jodie Foster be terrific child actors and become terrific adult actors. Gabriel was a child actor who has transitioned well. Callum is really special at his age. I hope he does whatever he wants to do in life. He may choose to continue this as an adult or not, but he has a real talent. We saw a lot of kids for this role, and we saw a lot of talented kids, but the gap between what he was capable of and everyone else we saw was really large. Seeing his auditions and working with him on a batch of episodes gave us the courage to write a scene like that. I’m not sure under normal circumstances that I would write a scene like that – it’s actually a couple scenes – and expect to get a good performance out of a 10-year-old kid in that way, but by the time we got to episode eight, we knew he was capable of it, and he just knocked it out of the park.

As the season goes on, we learn that the First Lady is shady, and even the President is shady. In episode nine, there’s something that feels satisfying about Peter saying to President Hagan, “With all due respect, sir, fuck you.” In that moment, does President Hagan just not understand who and what he’s dealing with, when it comes to Peter? Does he just think he can get out of anything?

RYAN: Without making too many real-life parallels, there’s a belief that a lot of people are corruptible, that a lot of people are buyable, that a lot of people are able to be intimidated. A president with extraordinary powers and extraordinary leverage can bend people to his will. It is nice to see that there are people in the world who aren’t corruptible and who aren’t intimidated in these circumstances. There is something really satisfying in seeing Peter, at great risk because we see the violence and threats brought upon him later in the episode, taking that stance. Great stands of principle don’t mean as much if there are no consequences to taking them. The thing that we admire is that Peter is someone who’s willing to speak truth to power and suffer the consequences of it. His life would be a lot easier if he just said, “Oh, I hear you, Mr. President. I guess it’s time to stand down and let’s brush everything else under the rug.” But we need more people like Peter in the world.

We’re just a TV show. I don’t want to overestimate the impact that has on the world, but I do think that art does have impact on people. It reminds us of the values we’d like to believe exist in ourselves. I think a lot about, would I be as courageous as the characters I write if put in similar circumstances? I’d like to think I would, but I don’t know for a fact that I would. It’s not until you’re in those situations that you find out. But writing these characters and showing a model for how we should behave in these instances sometimes can give us that little extra final bit of courage to push us into doing the right thing.

10-Shows-To-Watch-if-You-Love-'The-Night-Agent'

What made you decide to take out Catherine Weaver in the way that you did?

RYAN: First of all, we love Amanda Warren. We don’t “take out” characters without putting a great deal of thought into it. We’re always cognizant that when you’re taking out a character, you’re taking out a real live human being actor that works on your show from employment, so these conversations are never trivial in that way. We felt the best story for the show and ultimately for Peter and for the growth that we wanted to see in him was to suffer the loss of his mentor and boss and to have him start stepping into those leadership shoes a little bit. It’s a reminder of the danger of this work.

It’s not just that she died, but it’s that he lost Jay in the process of all that. He spent the episode talking to Jay and saying, “It’s up to you. These are the pros and cons, but we can keep you safe.” One of our favorite things to do is to find moments in scenes where the hero, in this case Peter, makes mistakes or fails because we all do. If Peter was perfect and unbeatable, it wouldn’t be that fun of a show to watch. He’d be Superman. He wouldn’t be a human being. So, there are a lot of creative reasons why we felt that was the right time to lose Catherine, but it’s no reflection on the actress and it’s no reflection on the character. It was the creative decision that led to the best story down the road, in our opinions.

You also had some really interesting action sequences this season, and it must be hard to keep that interesting in your third season now.

RYAN: I’m really proud of the underwater fight in episode nine. We went to the Dominican Republic to film that because that’s the only appropriate water tank in the Western Hemisphere that we could do that in. We ended up filming in four different countries this season, and I’m just extraordinarily proud of what our team came up with. We’re really proud of this season and can’t wait for people to see it.

Although Not Yet Officially in Production, Showrunner Shawn Ryan Has a Season 4 Plan for ‘The Night Agent’

"We're working on it. We're writing it."

You leave this season with Peter deciding to find a work-life balance. Who knows if he’ll actually be able to do that at all, but obviously that could open the door to him seeing Rose. You also bring up the possibility of a partner moving forward. Do you have a plan for Season 4? Would you bring Rose back? Could Peter actually have a partner that really has his best interests at heart, unlike the one this season?

RYAN: Season 4 has not officially been picked up yet, but Netflix and Sony have allowed us to start a writers’ room, so we’ve been having these conversations. The answer is that we have a plan for Season 4. We’re working on it. We’re writing it. When I’m done with these interviews today, I’m going to read the first draft of episode three. Sony and Netflix have read the first two episodes. We’re breaking episode five right now. So, the answer is that there is a plan and, hopefully, in the near future, we’ll get the official greenlight to make it. But for the moment, we’re just focusing on the scripts and the creative side. I want to keep the focus on Season 3 because that’s what’s coming out, and a lot still could change about Season 4. But to your point about Season 3, there is a plan to address the things that are left untied up at the end of Season 3.