In October 2024, Netflix renewed The Night Agent for a third season some three and a half months ahead of its Season 2 premiere. There has been no early Season 4 renewal for the action thriller starring Gabriel Basso this time, with Season 3 set to premiere Feb. 19, but work on the Los Angeles-set potential new installment is well underway.
“Season 4 is not officially picked up yet, but a while ago, in calendar year 2025, they did quietly pick up a writers room,” Ryan said during an interview with Deadline tied to the release of Season 3. “We’ve been working for a while on the storyline. We have some scripts, we are breaking stories. I think you know from the tax credit, there’s a date by which you need to be filming by; there’s time for us at the moment.”
Netflix sources indicated last month that executives were planning to see how Season 3 debuts before pulling the trigger on a fourth season. That after series producer Sony Pictures TV in November received a $31.6M tax credit to move the show from New York, where Seasons 2 and 3 were filmed, to Los Angeles. The credit comes with a six-month window to start production.
The Night Agent’s early Season 3 pickup came following the breakout success of its first season, which remains on Netflix’s Top 10 list of most popular English series with 98.2 million views its first 91 days. While Season 2’s delivery was strong too, it garnered a little over half of the Season 1 views, 53.2M, over almost twice as long period post-launch, 159 days.
“To Netflix’s credit, they want to make sure that the creative side of things is always buttoned up before committing that amount of money,” Ryan said. “We’re in the story-breaking, script-writing phase, and my guess is, sometime in the next [few weeks, up to a month], they’ll make a decision about officially greenlighting Season 4, and if and when they do, we’ll be ready to go with the scripts so that there’s not that much time between Season 3 and Season 4. I think Netflix cares about their viewers and is looking for ways to minimize the time between the seasons of their most successful shows.”
Because The Night Agent‘s outsized Season 1 success came as somewhat of a surprise, and the Season 2 renewal was followed by the writers strike, there was a 22-month gap between Seasons 1 and 2. For comparison, Season 3 will drop less than 13 months after Season 2.
If a renewal comes in the next month, The Night Agent will likely still be able to keep the yearly cadence despite producing 10 episodes a season, slightly higher than the typical 8-episode streaming drama installment.
“This cadence is easy,” Ryan, a veteran broadcast showrunner, said. “Compared to all the network stuff I did back in the day, you would have just finished making 22 episodes and before you’re even done doing post on that final episode, the writers room is starting up for the next season. When I was doing The Shield and The Unit, I think I made something like 44 episodes of TV in a calendar year. So this is nothing compared to that.”
Ryan created and executive produced FX’s The Shield, co-created/executive produced CBS’ S.W.A.T. and NBC’s Timeless and executive produced CBS’ The Unit, along with other network series he has worked on.
Season 3 of The Night Agent debuts Feb. 19.