I’m enthralled by the Night Agent. It’s not a good show, of course. It’s limp, it’s stale bread, it’s a ‘thriller’ without thrills. Yet I am totally enthralled.

My first reaction to it was one of confusion. The series was apparently created by Shawn Ryan, head writer of the widely acclaimed The Shield, a show that follows an LAPD unit stacked with corrupt psychos. It’s just so strange to have created a show steeped in the moral darkness of the police and then create a show with a bewildering amount of love for the FBI. The Night Agent’s Hero is so clean-cut he’s more of a shape than a person. He’s spotless and professional, and he has no vices. He’s free of toxic masculinity. He waves and smiles at little kids on the subway. He is competent, and he diligently follows procedure. He has no traumatic flashbacks. He has no problems at home. He has a perfectly clean and generically decorated apartment with fake books, IKEA-showroom-style. He is immune to the forces of corruption, even in a show with a lot of corruption. This show has a corrupt or compromised Chief of Staff, Vice President, Private Military Contractor, and Secret Service, but our Hero and the rest of the FBI are firmly against the Bad Guys’ Big Scheme. The FBI and its agents are apparently always pristine and incorruptible, honestly devoted to protecting America from the bad guys. Jesus Christ. This is some FBI-press-office-direct-to-TV-script type shit. Was the The Shield actually a plea for the feds to take over city policing? Maybe if I saw how much Quantico paid to make this shit, I’d be a little less confused.

I was not, however, confused about the plot. No confusion there. No, no of course not. Because you can predict with perfect accuracy what will happen in all the following episodes after watching about 15 minutes of the pilot. For example:

• We can be sure that once the tall, young, Aryan, perfectly morally upright, FBI Agent Hero is assigned to protect the Scared Girl Who Doesn’t Know What’s Going On And Doesn’t Trust Him Yet But Will Soon Be Romantically Involved With Him, they’ll be thrust into some situation that leaves them on the run with no one to trust.
• We know there’ll be a “Grab some clothes that fit you” and a lot of “Sir there’s a call for you” and some commands followed up with “Now!” and a dash of “he ran shadow ops in [insert dangerous country]”
• We know the Hero will take bullet wound, which will require him to take his shirt off so that the Girl can stitch him up and then kiss him.
• We know that there will be an Assassin With A Lot of Eyeliner and an Assassin With Very Identifiable Tattoo and an Assassin With Accent and a lot of silencers as well.
• We know that, accused of something he didn’t do, the Hero’s face will end up on a TV Breaking News Alert, and he and the Girl will watch.
• We know that there will be computer stuff (ie, typing into Windows Command Prompt in a hacker-y way.)
• We know that, in the end, the suspicious and shady FBI Deputy Director will not be the Traitor High Up In The Government and that it’ll actually be the down-to-earth, motherly Chief of Staff whom the Hero trusts completely and sees as a mentor who turns out to be evil.
• We know that the seemingly unrelated plot lines about the Vice President’s Daughter and the bombing that Hero thwarts at the very beginning of the pilot are actually all lead to the Terrorists’ and Traitors’ Big Scheme. (The Scheme will, of course, be much more complex than it needs to be.)
• We know that all the key players will join up at the end to put a stop to the Big Scheme and that one of them will have to sacrifice themselves, probably The One Who Looks At A Picture Of Their Loved Ones.
• And we know at the very end the Hero’s Dad Who Mysteriously Died Under Mysterious Circumstances will turn out to be good guy who died fighting for his country while doing spy stuff.

We know these things so well that we needn’t even watch the show. We can just run it through in our minds. This show is basically spoiler-proof. This show could be any show. This show is every show.

I suppose we cannot expect too much out of Netflix. They’re going through tough times. When interest rates were 0%, it was totally fine for your business model to be offering nearly unlimited content for a small subscription and take on huge losses in order to increase market share. But interest rates are very much not 0% now, they’re losing market share and the rights to popular shows to other streaming services, and their subscriber growth is slowing. So they’ve raised prices, cracked down on sharing accounts, and cranked up the Netflix Studio Content Factory into overdrive. Content, not TV Shows or Movies. Content

What’s the difference, one asks? Imagine a forest. It’s an unfathomably complex ecosystem. Forests have a lot of value because of their usefulness. They’re useful to nature, they’re useful to the creatures that call it home, they’re useful to us because they absorb CO2 and because they provide lumber for building homes and lots of other stuff. In some other society that isn’t ours, the goal would be to maximize the forest’s usefulness for everyone, through some kind of mixture of preservation and sustainable logging or whatever. But, you see, lumber is the only aspect of the forest’s value that can readily exchanged for cash. And this is what is maximized in our economy; this is the lens the forest must seen through in our little competitive market system. The new teleology of the forest is to be lumber. Everything else disappears in the eyes of capital. The other valuable and useful things do not and never did exist. Capital wants a forest with evenly spaced columns of trees, to maximize efficiency. Capital wants the forest to be rationalized. Anything that inhibits the maximization of returns - any critters, any environmental concerns, any pleas for natural beauty - will be quickly ushered out of the picture.

Content is the rationalization of entertainment. Night Agent seems mindless because capital is mindless. Capital demands returns. That’s all it thinks about. And content emerges from the void on a mission to perform well in the only metric that counts: clicks. Eyes on. Because that’s the metric that can become cash. So capital wants to make a thriller, how does do it? It slaps together a script from a Large Language Model in a couple days, hires some cheap nobodies to read the lines, finds some inexpensive set locations, and tacks on a name that will be easy to translate into other languages. And you will watch it. It’ll be #1 on Netflix for a few weeks. Because what the fuck else are you gonna watch?

They say that communism would be the death of creativity. How strange. Because capital likes its art with all the edges shaved off. It likes it smooth, stripped down to its essentials - the essentials that generate returns, that is. Because capital demands returns. The Night Agent is content, and the Night Agent is a process, a process that will advance, a process we will not and cannot stop.