According to Netflix, “The Night Agent” was the streamer’s most-watched title in the first half of 2023, the year it premiered. I liked it well enough for its no-fuss, meat-and-potatoes quality, about an FBI agent working a boring job who gets pulled into a conspiracy that involves protecting the life of a cybersecurity expert. Her ace computer skills mean she becomes his unofficial partner and the corruption they uncover ultimately goes all the way to the White House. In terms of raising the stakes after that, the show’s path seemed limited. But Season 2 has arrived and says, hold my beer: How about the threat of a chemical weapons attack? The series is less assured about what it’s doing this time around, and it falls into the trap of taking an idea suited for a movie and stretching it to fill a 10-episode season. I’ve noted this in reviews of other shows and not to be a broken record, but it’s an ongoing issue. Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) returns as the stolid FBI agent who is the show’s protagonist. At the end of Season 1, he was flying to parts unknown to join a super-secret government agency called Night Action. The first rule of Night Action is do not talk about Night Action! It’s like the CIA … but not the CIA. This is a big step up for Peter, who finds himself on assignment in Bangkok working a surveillance operation. When his cover is blown, he’s on the run, even from his unflappable case officer (Amanda Warren), because he doesn’t know who he can trust. This was his dilemma in Season 1 and I don’t fault the series for falling back on the trope. He’s right to be suspicious. And it gives show creator Shawn Ryan an excuse to pull cyber expert Rose Larkin (Luciane Buchanan) back into the narrative. Not only are Peter’s bosses looking for him, but so are anonymous individuals who mean him harm, one of whom calls Rose to see if she’s heard from him. She hasn’t. She’s been trying to put her life back together in the aftermath of last season, but that phone call has piqued her curiosity and concern. So she uses a facial recognition program to figure out where Peter is and find out why he’s in hiding. Turns out, he’s in New York. She hops the next plane out. The series has evolved into an international thriller, which is disappointing and uninspired. Peter is an FBI agent and there’s enough corruption, crime and danger committed by our fellow Americans to fill out a story, instead of turning the show into yet another spy drama with global implications. (There are plenty of those shows right now anyway.) The first episode is a barrage of action, bullets and suspense. And yet the stakes feel empty because we don’t know what the stakes even are, beyond Peter staying alive, which, I’m sorry to report, isn’t as compelling a hook as it should be. That’s because the scripts don’t give Basso much to work with. His jaw is clenched and he’s filled with righteous purpose, but Peter has almost no interiority and Basso is not the kind of actor, at least not yet, who can fill in what isn’t on the page. Peter and Rose share a traumatic (and romantic) history, but when they reunite their former intimacy feels pro forma. I miss the quiet scenes of them piecing together what’s happening. That was always the necessary counterbalance to the show’s action, which is now in overdrive. I suppose it’s meant to be propulsive, but it reduces Season 2 to a series of set pieces filled with tension. Suspense is good! But you need a story to anchor it. Forefront, Luciane Buchanan. In the background from left, Gabriel Basso and Amanda Warren in Season 2 of “The Night Agent. (Christopher Saunders/Netflix)Here’s what the show does well: There’s a much stronger parallel narrative about a young woman named Noor who works at the Iranian embassy in New York. She secretly wants to defect, but her CIA contact will only help if she’s able to smuggle out intel he considers sufficiently useful. The dangers are real, but her handler is a jerk and unmoved by the risks she faces. Eventually, Peter takes over and he’s not much of an improvement. We know very little about Noor and her family back home, but actress Arienne Mandi brings real complexity to her performance of civilian-as-amatuer-spy who is trying not to freak out as she’s fumbling along the way. Noor must navigate the demands of various men, including the romantic interest of the ambassador’s handsome but unnerving security chief (Keon Alexander), a wonderfully inscrutable fixer (Marwan Kenzari) who also works for Night Action and never breaks a sweat and of course Peter, who is more than happy to throw her to the wolves. The unspoken subtext in their scenes together is that she’s not American so ultimately her life doesn’t matter when the greater good is at stake. Rose is deeply disturbed by this and you think, at least someone here has a moral compass! Noor’s fate becomes the show’s strongest element, but even so, the season ends without much of an emotional release (but not before setting up the premise for a theoretical Season 3). To the show’s credit, it doesn’t shy away from portraying American hypocrisy, on both an individual and global-political level, and it understands human desperation. But its concept of what constitutes a threat to American democracy feels stuck in a previous era, as if the threats were all foreign. Tellingly, the show doesn’t want to grapple with the way Peter’s hero complex has dulled his humanity. There’s nothing wrong with a show’s lead evolving into an antihero — “The Good Wife” did it exceptionally well by the end of its seven seasons — but the writing needs to build a case and lay the groundwork so that the evolution feels plausible. It’s a problem for “Night Agent” when you increasingly find yourself not just rooting for Peter to fail, but hoping he gets one between the eyes. “The Night Agent” Season 2 — 2 stars (out of 4) Where to watch: Netflix Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.