It’s not often a television show places such a great level of trust in its audience.
But here we are. What could be doomed to live out its life as a merely decent crime drama is elevated to a meditation on the complexities of the American social justice system.
The Night Of, the new limited series from HBO, begins with young Naz (Riz Ahmed), a nerdy young Pakistani-American student, sharing his class notes with a member of the school basketball team he’s tutoring. It’s clear Naz loves the game, but this is probably as close to the game as he’s going to get.
His efforts finally pay off when he’s invited to a big team party that night. Elated, Naz agrees and goes home to start practicing his smooth moves for the all the “mad females” he’s promised will be in attendance. There’s only one problem: as the time to leave is approaching, his friend bails. No big deal, right? Except his friend was supposed to drive him there. Plan A foiled and stranded in Queens with the party looming, Naz improvises a Plan B: taking his father’s cab instead.
Without the knowledge to turn on the “Off Duty” light, however, a young woman (Sofia Black-D’Elia) hops into Naz’s cab. Immediately taken by her enigmatic nature, he decides to take her where she wants to go: the beach. Or, rather, a river, the closest thing he’s able to substitute in Manhattan.
This begins a night of sex, drugs, and alcohol, at the girl’s mysteriously nice Central Park-adjacent brownstone, a three-front awakening on his part as a man who is generally used to being under the thumb of others, whether those thumbs belong to the basketball team, his parents, or anybody else who he feels dictates his existence.
All the fun and games come to an end, though, when he wakes up later that night with little recollection of what happened other than a good time. When he lets his date know he’s about to head out, he finds her stabbed to death. This puts him in the middle of an intense police investigation with little to go on except his limited recollection.
The Night Of is, oftentimes in spite of itself, an intensely compelling show. It takes the police procedural and turns it over a couple times while still hitting the familiar beats. It’s a pretty remarkable piece of television, all the more so considering how fresh it feels while still remaining a faithful remake of the BBC’s Criminal Justice while adding in its all-too-relevant twists.
That being said, The Night Of isn’t without fault. In fact, the first twenty-five minutes or so threaten to derail the whole proceeding.
The biggest problem the show has is being too slow a burn. The episode is at least a third of the way over before the main dramatic action takes place, which would be a more than forgivable sin except for the fact that the extra time isn’t used to the advantage of the narrative. We don’t learn much more about Naz than we already knew, and the young woman he’s with is never given much more than a waifish portrait. And while Black-D’Elia does her level best with the material she’s given, it’s tough to view her character as anything more than the plot device she’s designed to be.
Once the show gets going, however, it gets going. It’s a nearly excruciating naturalistic portrait of a man trapped in a system hellbent on working against him. The Night Of makes no qualms of exploring and setting up the theme of racism in the justice system. From the outset, Naz is faced with prejudice, whether conscious or not. But the show portrays these prejudices in a complex and appropriately contradictory way, giving each character his or her own view of the system and those who constitute it. It doesn’t explore these ideas to their fullest extent, but that’s okay. It more often than not hints at them. After all, nothing is so explicit in real life, and why should it be any more so in fiction? Besides, it’s only the first episode, and in this one episode the showrunners have done a more than admirable job of planting these seeds in our minds for consideration in the future episodes.
Overall, the show is exquisitely acted. Riz Ahmed gives a wonderfully innocent performance as someone who is in over his head and just wants to go home. Likewise, all the supporting actors (and it’s tough to tell at this point who will be a main player or not) give extraordinary, true-to-life performances. John Turturro, taking over the part from the late James Gandolfini, is especially great as the lawyer who sees himself as the ally to the vilified.
All of these performances are couched in an exquisitely show shell. Remarkably and breathtakingly — and perhaps this sounds like a contradiction — the show does little with its New York setting. There’s no excessive stylization; it merely presents the city as it is, which adds to the thematic heft.
The Night Of is perfectly content (at least in its inaugural episode) to show and not tell. It presents us with a complex situation and doesn’t impose on our natural desire to interpret and speculate. Rather, we are given the pieces and left on our own as to how we interpret them — a refreshing level of trust in the audience.
The premiere episode wasn’t perfect — not by any means. However, it exemplifies that that which is flawed can be so much better than that which is polished to a glistening finish. It is compelling and unexpected.
