Director Patrick Wally
Courtesy of WyFilm
Entertainment
The Night Agent Cancellation: Inside the Netflix Hit’s Ratings Fall
When “The Night Agent” first debuted on Netflix in 2023, the Gabriel Basso-led action series dominated the platform, landing as the most-watched title by hours viewed for the first half of that year.
Just over three years and two seasons later, “The Night Agent” has lost its ratings crown, with Season 3 debuting in lackluster fashion in February, getting outpaced by a buzzy “Top Model” documentary and the new season of “Bridgerton.” Netflix still granted “The Night Agent” an additional installment in the wake of the ratings slump, but, less than two months later, announced Season 4 would be the show’s last.
The decision to end the series was attributed to a creative decision, with showrunner Shawn Ryan sharing in a statement, “ever since the initial success of ‘The Night Agent,’ I’ve been obsessed with eventually delivering a proper and thrilling conclusion to the show and to Peter Sutherland’s journey.”
While a ratings downturn after a successful first season is nothing to be discouraged by — even “Bridgerton” has seen slight decreases through the seasons — “The Night Agent” might have simply run its course with Netflix audiences, with viewers less keen to hold interest in longer-running bingeable series that take too long (in viewers’ eyes) to return with more episodes.
Beyond the downsides of a binge model, these ratings downticks signal that a more competitive streaming market has made it harder for Netflix to cultivate audiences for long-running shows, so it’s letting go of the model behind foundational hits, like “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards,” for titles with shorter lifespans. Of course, there are still exceptions to the new rules — like “Virgin River” and “Bridgerton.”
“The Night Agent” first debuted in March 2023 atop Netflix’s weekly top 10 TV list to 168.71 million hours viewed, more than tripling the viewership of its closest competitor, “Shadow and Bone,” which tallied 55.03 million views during the same week.
While those hours viewed don’t reflect the viewership metrics Netflix shifted to just months later in 2023, “The Night Agent’s” domination was undeniable: the season stayed in the top 10 list for 17 weeks and cracked Netflix’s top 10 most popular shows of all time in just three weeks. In fact, it wasn’t until last month that “The Night Agent” Season 1 was booted off the Netflix top 10 most popular English-language shows by limited murder mystery series “His & Hers,” which took over the No. 10 spot.
By the time “The Night Agent” returned for its second season in January 2025, it still dominated Netflix’s TV offerings as the most-watched series with 13.9 million views during its debut week, soaring over “XO, Kitty” with 9.2 million views. Season 2 remained in the top 10 for six weeks and held onto the top spot over “The Recruit” Season 2 (more on that below), and even ranked as the top English-language show for four consecutive weeks.
That momentum slowed down by the time Season 3 arrived, when “The Night Agent” debuted to 8.4 million views in the No. 2 spot on the weekly TV list, behind “Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model,” which took the top spot with 14.2 million views. This time around, “The Night Agent” only stayed in the top 10 for four weeks, though it stayed at the No. 2 spot for two, outpaced by the “Top Model” and “Dinosaurs” docs and “Bridgerton” Season 4.
In terms of overall viewing during the first half of 2023, “The Night Agent” tallied 812.1 million hours viewed (also reflecting the previous methodology) — landing as the top title for the six-month period — but shifted viewership metrics for the first half of 2025 saw Season 2 come in as the No. 9 most-watched program for the interval, behind juggernauts like “Adolescence” and “Squid Game” Seasons 2 and 3. Comprehensive viewing figures for the first half of 2026 are not yet available.
Debuting right alongside the first two seasons of “The Night Agent” was another law enforcement crime thriller with a young lead, “The Recruit,” which had a solid Season 1 debut but, as mentioned, didn’t stand out by Season 2 when it premiered merely a week apart from “The Night Agent” Season 2. The Noah Centineo series was canceled.
This isn’t to say that action thriller series aren’t working for Netflix — just this week “Man on Fire” debuted as the week’s top TV show with 11 million views. But new releases have the benefit of being new and shiny to viewers, promising a quick and propulsive watch — for the weekend.
While the binge model lets viewers give in to their urges to find out what happens immediately, as we outlined last week, it shortens the cultural moment for shows, as seen by “The Pitt” seeing growth into its second season while series like “Running Point” and “Beef” — neither of which have yet been renewed for Season 3 — see sophomore ratings slumps.
Kentucky Derby races to historic ratings
Like its history-making winner, Saturday’s Kentucky Derby raced to its most-watched on record with an average of 19.6 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, galloping over its 2025 viewership by 11%, per preliminary Nielsen data. Viewership peaked at 24.4 million viewers from 7-7:15 p.m. ET, when Cherie DeVaux became first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner, which also marked the biggest peak audience for the Derby and was up 12% from last year.
The Derby also brought some attention to Hallmark’s new movie “Kentucky Roses,” which was created in partnership with Churchill Downs. The movie stood out as the most-watched cable entertainment program on Saturday and of the week among key demographics.
Stanley Cup Playoffs start with a bang
In just the opening round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the hockey postseason is already breaking records for the NHL. Round 1 of the playoffs wrapped up as the most-watched opening round on record in the U.S. with an average 1.2 million viewers across ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TRU and TBS, up 68% from 2025’s Round 1. Additionally, both ESPN and TNT Sports brought in their biggest Stanley Cup Playoffs audience of the current rights deal.
Some notable ratings wins include Montreal-Tampa Bay’s Game 7 with an average audience of 2.3 million viewers on TNT Sports, which marks the most-watched first round game on cable ever featuring a Canadian team, as well Philadelphia-Pittsburgh’s Game 1, which averaged 2.1 million viewers, the most-watched Round 1 game on cable, excluding Game 7s.
“The Pitt” keeps rising
The sustained momentum during “The Pitt” Season 2 has paid off, with the medical drama scoring the top spot on Nielsen’s overall streaming list for the first time ever.
For the week of March 30, “The Pitt” tallied 1.16 billion minutes, marking the show’s eighth consecutive week with over 1 billion viewing minutes as well as its 11th billion-minute week of the past 12.
ICYMI:
- “Live With Kelly and Mark” scored its fifth straight week of ratings growth as it returned from spring break
- “Apex” soared even higher in its second week on Netflix with 40 million views
- Just in time for May the Fourth, Nielsen reports “Star Wars” has found a multigenerational audience in its franchise series, with both “The Mandalorian” and “Andor” emerging as cross-generational favorites
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EXCLUSIVE: GK Barry agency HLD Talent has signed content creator and By Babes co-founder Heather Bowling.
The social media star, business owner and neurodiversity advocate is joining up with the likes of Barry, Mariam Musa and Shakira Khan at the London-based HLD, which is lead by creators agent Hannah Holland.
She is known as a the co-founder of By Babes, a UK-based and community-driven beauty and cosmetics brand, and creates much of her content around the company’s focus and products.
HLD called her “bold, ambitious and completely herself” and noted that she has a “built an incredibly loyal and highly engaged audience who have grown with her and who are invested in far more than just the content she creates.”
Bowling appeared on Season 5 of Footasylum’s YouTube series Locked In and made an appearance on Barry’s podcast Saving Grace.
“As she enter this next chapter, we’ll be working together to build on everything she’s already created, while opening up new opportunities across premium fashion and beauty, entrepreneurship, media, presenting and beyond,” said HLD in a statement.
Bowling was previously with Insanity.
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EXCLUSIVE: David Barron, the British film producer with credits on six Harry Potter films, is entering the generative artificial intelligence space.
Barron has agreed to produce an AI adaptation of Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild, which is written and directed by Simon Rumley (Crushed, Red White & Blue).
The film will be generated at nmatic, with CGI and traditional VFX helping deliver more complex scenes. Filmmakers are billing it as the first faithful adaptation of London’s novel because it will be made from Buck’s subjective experience.
“London’s canvass is so epic, the Alaskan geography so gruelling, the dog and wolf fights so visceral that a faithful cinematic adaptation has hitherto been logistically and financially impossible,” said Barron. ”But technology has finally caught up with London’s vision, and we believe now is the time to do justice.”
The Call of the Wild tells the story of a pampered St. Bernard dog, who is torn from his life of privilege in California’s Santa Clara Valley and is sold into the brutal world of the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, where he discovers the wild instinct that has always lurked within.
The film has been adapted for the screen several times, including a 2020 Michael Green film starring Harrison Ford.
David Barron, Mark Sandell (A Liar’s Autobiography) and Nick Price produce. Chris Catchpole, Carl Lyttle, and Toby White head up prompting and technical at nmatic.
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EXCLUSIVE: Lightdox has acquired world sales rights to the documentary My Home of Wind and Sand ahead of its world premiere Tuesday at the Zurich Film Festival.
Filmmaker Patrick Wally spent over a decade on his film, a portrait of women’s rights, human rights and climate activist Najla Mohamed Lamin, who was born in a Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria. Lamin has led a peaceful campaign supporting the right of Western Sahara to self-determination, a dream of Sahrawi refugees that has been frustrated for more than half a century.
Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg is expected to attend Tuesday’s world premiere and will participate in a conversation afterwards with Lamin. Thunberg visited the Sahrawi refugee camps last year, where she and Lamin conducted a workshop on climate change.
“Told through conversations with the filmmaker – who gradually becomes visible inside the story – the documentary refuses to reduce Najla to a symbol of a geopolitical conflict,” notes a synopsis. “Western Sahara is experienced through one person living its consequences in real time. Najla addresses international institutions, builds practical spaces for women and children, raises her family and continues to argue for peaceful resistance even as a generation born in exile grows older without a political resolution.”
The synopsis continues, “When armed conflict resumes after decades of ceasefire, the convictions that have shaped Najla’s public life are tested. The film follows her as she asks what pacifism, patience and agency can mean when history seems immovable – and whether one person can still create change inside circumstances that appear impossible.”
Najla Mohamed Lamin at the dunes near the Sahrawi refugee camp of Smara.
Courtesy of WyFIlm
Anna Berthollet, CEO of Lightdox, commented, “Najla has lived her entire life with an unresolved conflict. Yet Patrick’s film is not a geopolitical story; it is an intimate portrait of how she chooses to live, raise her children and build a future for her community. He spent eleven years following her journey and bringing her story and mission to the screen. At a time when Western Sahara is once again receiving international attention, we believe it is important that Najla’s perspective is part of that conversation. We feel very humbled to have been entrusted with bringing Patrick and Najla’s deeply personal story to audiences around the world.”
The border wall berm and Moroccan military base separating the Moroccan occupied territory from the
Polisario controlled territory of Western Sahara.
Courtesy of WyFilm
The unresolved status of Western Sahara has been largely ignored in the U.S. and much of the West, but it has kept the Sahrawi people in terrible limbo. Spain ruled the territory as its colonial possession for the better part of a hundred years, but after it ceded claims in the mid-1970s, hopes for the territory to determine its own future were dashed when Morocco took control of much of Western Sahara. The Polisario Front, representing the Indigenous Sahrawi people, seeks self-determination and is supported by Algeria (where the refugee camps are located). The United Nations officially designates Western Sahara as a “Non-Self-Governing Territory.”
In a director’s statement, Wally said, “When I met Najla ten years ago, I knew this film needed to be made. At the time I had never heard of the issue of Western Sahara. I thought of myself as reasonably informed about the struggles shaping the world, yet I knew nothing about more than 200,000 Sahrawis living for generations in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, established after the war and displacement of 1975. That absence in my own awareness shocked me.
“What struck me first, however, was not the conflict in the abstract but Najla herself. I was surprised by my own assumptions. Here was a woman raised in a refugee camp who was exceptionally articulate, politically precise and full of a vision for the future. She spoke about peaceful resistance, about a generation born in the camps, and about the endurance required to believe in a bright future when nobody outside seems able to see it.”
An aerial view of the Sahrawi refugee camp Smara, in the Algerian desert, near Tindouf.
Courtesy of WyFilm
Along with directing, Wally serves as the film’s cinematographer. The film is produced by Shirin Hooshmandi, Najla Mohamed Lamin, and Patrick Wally. Anna Kirst edited the film, with additional editing by Daniel Rutz. The music is by Ahmed Zain.
In addition to Tuesday’s world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival, My Home of Wind and Sand will hold public screenings on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday.
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