This is a Belgian television series, primarily in French (but featuring a cast of diverse nationalities and languages). It kicks off when a desperate man hijacks a red-eye flight to demand the pilot continue to fly away from the sunrise. His wild claims are soon substantiated: the sun has become lethal, its rays killing everyone on Earth in an inexorable march around the globe. For the people on this plane, their only hope to stay alive is to keep finding ways to stay in darkness, flying ever westward and... into the night.
The simplest encapsulation of this series I can think of is that it's a streamlined version of Lost. It features a diverse cast of people struggling to survive after a catastrophe. Each episode is nominally about one character in particular, featuring a flashback of their life before the airplane. It's a character drama at its heart, about the divisions within the group that manifest in the high-pressure situation. And it's a bit science fiction, of course, given the central conceit of it all.
But, as I said, it's also streamlined -- in every conceivable way. There's really just the one central "mystery," and it does ultimately have an answer. The character flashbacks aren't woven throughout an episode, but rather are short vignettes at the beginning of an episode that get right to the point before rejoining the action in the present. Episodes run closer to a half-hour than an hour. There are only six episodes in each of the two seasons.
Still, even this stripped-down storytelling is sufficient to be engaging. Characters, and the relationships between them, develop quickly -- and this quickly becomes the reason to keep watching. Some people are likeable and others loathsome. Some toggle back and forth between the two. New problems arise that have to be overcome -- though with so few episodes, the series doesn't have to go to extreme lengths to keep injecting new jeopardy into the mix.
Unless you're dialed in to foreign actors to a far greater extent than most, you're not likely going to recognize any of the performers here. Still, everyone seems well cast for their roles, and more than capable of making this far-fetched situation seem believable. Many of them are acting in at least two languages, upping the degree of difficulty. But there really aren't any characters I didn't "care" about (in one way or another).
Unfortunately, the second season does end on a cliffhanger... and there has been no indication either way as to whether there are more episodes to come. There is a single season of a spin-off series (which I've begun to watch; perhaps that will be a future post), but it's a different take on the central premise rather than a continuation. This could be all the Into the Night there will ever be, and that lack of a real ending might be a dealbreaker for many who would otherwise enjoy it.
But I myself would give the series a B+. At roughly 6 hours, end to "end," it's far less of a time commitment than most TV recommendations you'll get. If you're one of those people who liked Lost, but thinks it went on far too long for its own good, this almost certainly will be up your alley.
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