How “The Night Agent” Keeps It Real: Shawn Ryan on Panama Papers Inspiration and Filming in New York
During Prestige TV’s anti-hero golden age, showrunner Shawn Ryan created The Shield about corrupt cops in L.A. Now he’s paying more attention to the good guys. His series The Night Agent features Gabriel Basso as FBI agent Peter Sutherland, who tries to do the right thing even as he’s surrounded by terrorists hellbent on assassinating, poisoning, or blowing up anything or anybody that gets in their way.
For Season Three (now streaming on Netflix), The Night Agent, filmed mainly in New York, teams Peter with reporter Isabel De Leon (Genesis Rodriguez) to expose a dirty money scheme, manipulated by Jacob “The Broker” Monroe (Louis Herthum), that leads all the way to the White House. “I want to believe that there are Peter Sutherlands out there fighting to make the world a better place,” Ryan says. “I’d like to believe that there are people like Isabel doing the hard reporting to expose corruption and criminality in our powerful institutions. That might be idealistic of me, but I guess you write the world you want to live in, and I’ve been around long enough to know that TV has power.”
Speaking from his home office in Los Angeles suburb Sherman Oaks, Ryan talks about the 2016 Panama Papers scandal, the perks of shooting in New York, and the luxury of having a sturdy star who performs nearly all the stunts himself.
Several of your shows, including The Night Agent, dramatize the question of whether or not institutions can be trusted. Government agencies like the CIA, or local police, or financial institutions are all supposed to be fundamentally honest, but it seems like your stories often push back against that.
I hadn’t thought of [my work] in those terms, but just as you said it, I realized instantly it’s true. Going back to The Shield and a lot of things that we did on The Unit, which I produced with David Mamet, and my ABC show Last Resort — about a submarine captain and his crew not trusting orders they were getting from D.C. — and now, thinking about The Night Agent and specifically the Season 3 story, you’re absolutely right. [Laughing.] I’m gonna have to go into therapy, I guess, to figure out what institutions hurt me as a kid!
Well, the theme of institutional corruption seems especially ripe at this time in our country’s history. How does that reality affect your storytelling?
I don’t like to reveal things about me personally, ’cause I want the work to speak for itself, but I do tend to feel that institutions are only as trustworthy as the people running them. When you get the wrong people, it can lead to a lot of harm. The Shield was very cynical. The Night Agent is a little more optimistic.
For sure. I wonder if you find it challenging for fiction to keep up with reality right now when it comes to flagrant corruption?
I try not to carry my own personal politics into my shows, and our characters are fictional, but I think it does feel like, you know, the grift is in. At least when I was growing up, there was some shame about [corruption]. Now, I think, there’s a shamelessness in that you can get caught doing whatever, and you can just move on because you think people will forget about it in a couple of days. That [attitude] offends my sensibilities.
In the new season, Peter and Isabel get entangled with a dirty money trail that involves amoral money-laundering practices. How did you get onto the idea of banks being complicit in criminal activity?
I got fixated on this idea going back to the release of the Panama Papers. “Oh, there’s this whole shadow banking world that exists to protect rich people who are trying to avoid taxes and dictators who plunder their own countries.” That made me wonder, who are these bankers? They facilitate arms deals, drug deals, and human trafficking, for a small percentage [in transaction fees], but they seemingly never pay a price. These are the words we essentially put into Isabel’s mouth in Episode Three.
The Night Agent includes a lot of detail on how money laundering actually works. How do you know all of that?
We did a lot of research. We spoke to people who had worked for the FBI’s financial crimes divisions, and that’s where we learned about SARS — Suspicious Activity Reports. Banks have to report suspicious activity, but [Treasury Department staffers] don’t have to investigate. Then it becomes a question of: “How reliable or corrupt are the institutions that do the investigating, and who are their buddies? Are they corruptible?” All of these questions led us to our A storyline.
You shot most of The Night Agent in New York State. Is it important to you to consider the economic impact made by a big-budget, ten-episode show like The Night Agent?
It’s immensely important to me. You can’t work on as many shows as I have, where you get to know your band of crew members, without feeling the impact of all this production moving overseas. We filmed season one of The Night Agent in Canada, so it’s nothing against Canada. But with the success we had on this show, we were able to move it to New York for seasons two and three.
You filmed a few scenes in Istanbul, right?
Yes, and we filmed some [water tank sequences] in the Dominican Republic and did flashback stuff in Mexico City. But the vast majority was shot in New York. I see the budgets on our show having real economic impacts, not just on the crew, but for all the businesses that support the production and provide props and wardrobe, the location work you do, and the rental fees for houses. Going way back to my Shield days, the police station in our story was a converted old church. The location fees we paid to the actual church enabled it to continue serving the community, because they were having some financial problems. So, there can be a real cascade effect.
You’ve sustained a long career dating back to your years writing for Nash Bridges. How have you seen the business change here in Los Angeles?
Working in the early 2000s, if you had a new show, you’d be like, “Where are we going to film this? There’s no stage space. Everything’s full.” Now, everything’s empty. It’s a shame, I think, because I care about the heart of Hollywood. Not every show needs to film here. Not every show should film here. I filmed a show in Chicago, and that was wonderful. Filmed a show called Terriers in San Diego, filmed a show in Hawaii. If we can make American shows in America, I think we should, and I want to do my part in helping to do that.
In The Night Agent includes this great change-of-pace episode midway through the season, when Peter and Isabel track down a crooked politician at a hunting lodge in what looks like upstate New York.
That really is a hunting lodge, and it’s a couple of hours north of New York City. We essentially filmed there for a week, and I think a lot of the cast and crew actually stayed there. That’s a special episode, written by Eileen Myers with Adam Arkin directing. We got lucky that there was snow on the ground, which lends this very cool sheen, and then having this wonderful guest performance from Timothy Hutton — it’s always great when you can get an Oscar-winning actor drop in cold for one episode.
The Night Agent does an artful job of alternating twisty-turny plot twists, character-driven backstories, and personal relationship stuff with big, brash action sequences. How did you approach the car chases, explosions, and gunfights?
In this day and age of AI and CGI, we’re trying hard to make a show that feels grounded, believable, and really visceral, so we use as few special effects and green screen as possible. We have Gabriel Basso, who is, by far, the best actor I’ve ever worked with when it comes to stunts. He’s fearless. We don’t have to use edits or shoot from behind to cover that up.
So that’s really Gabriel Basso doing these insane fight sequences?
Yes! In the big underwater sequence, that’s really him. There’s a shot in the first episode, in Istanbul, where he’s driving backwards and doing a 180. There’s no green screen fake stuff. You can see him inside the car. Gabriel trained with professional drivers and got certified. Moments like that, you don’t [often] see in other TV shows and movies.
The Night Agent is streaming now.
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Featured image: The Night Agent. Gabriel Basso as Peter Sutherland in episode 310 of The Night Agent. Cr. Christopher Saunders/Netflix © 2026
