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Entertainment

‘The Night Of’ Is Everything a Crime Show Should Be

HBO's latest glossy crime show is powerful, tense, and a rare examination of what it's really like to be arrested in America.
Still from 'The Night Of'

Some spoilers for the first episode of The Night Of ahead.

The most tense sequence I've seen on TV this year happens midway through the first episode of HBO's The Night Of. It starts when Naz, a young Pakistani American played by Riz Ahmed, wakes up late at night in the home of the woman he's spent a spontaneous, unhinged night of sex and drugs with. He tells her he's leaving, then turns on the light: She's dead, her bloodied body covered in knife wounds.

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This is the moment, were we watching Law & Order, that the theme song would come in and we'd flash-forward through the routine business of a crime scene investigation—photographs, police tape, banter from grizzled detectives, witness interviews, the zeroing in on a suspect. This is the rock upon which the church of crime shows is built. The business of collecting evidence and making the arrest is compressed so the plot can speed toward the inevitable courtroom confession and/or last-minute exoneration at the end of the hour. Then on to the next episode.

The central conceit of The Night Of, based on the British series Criminal Justice, is that we see this not through the jaded eyes of officers doing their jobs, but from the suspect's perspective. Naz panics when he sees the body, and the viewer cringes as we watch him do exactly the wrong things—we're trained from decades of cop shows to know the amateur mistakes he's making, how easy he's making it for the police to pin the crime on him.

Except they don't, at least not right away, even though the cops already have him in custody after picking him up for reckless driving. It takes a web of coincidences for the slow-moving officers to finally realize Naz's connection to the scene, and during that time, we're treated to the agonizing display of Naz wondering if it's possible for him to get away, and whether or not his life will ever be the same.

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The Night Of could be said to belong to the genre critic Matt Zoller Seitz once dubbed "the slow crime procedural," programs where investigations play out over the course of a season, with lots of time spent on the internal lives of the suspects, victims, and cops involved. But most of these shows still have at their center the traditional police antihero, a la The Killing, True Detective, and The Fall. Putting Ahmed's character at the center of the first episode changes the focus dramatically. Instead of another show about the imperfect pursuit of justice, we're getting a story about someone trapped inside a bureaucracy that has rules he doesn't understand.

You can trace the show's lineage directly back to The Wire—the crime writer Richard Price worked on David Simon's classic and co-created The Night Of. But The Wire wore its political views on its sleeve, while The Night Of often aims for something more atmospheric. The show's vision of Manhattan is all confusing streets and dark recesses, a place where everyone is watching everyone else in rearview mirrors, surveillance cameras, curtained windows. Detectives are tired, beat cops want to get home, suspects want to escape, but the city won't let them leave. When a PCP-addled perp is wrestled onto the police station floor by cops as Naz watches, alarmed, it's a sudden dose of violence that is also utterly ordinary. Stories are happening all around you, and it's your bad luck if you find yourself ensnared in one.

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Near the end of the episode, Naz is informed that his body, like the apartment, is a crime scene and will need to be examined. He's taken to a space reminiscent of a grungy locker room and made to strip while Detective Box (played by a world-weary Bill Camp) looks on. The camera focuses on the scratches and gouges on Naz's back—presumably from the rough sex he had before the murder—and as the cops force him to stand against the wall and remove his underwear there's more than a hint of sexual violence, of Naz being so thoroughly in the grasp of authority that he has lost control even of his body.

When defense attorney John Stone (John Turturro, also world-weary; this is a world that tires its characters out) shows up near the end of the of the episode, Naz at least has an apparent ally, but his situation is barely improved. (The role was originally supposed to go to James Gandolfini, who spearheaded the project and even appeared in the pilot before dying of a heart attack in 2013. Gandolfini is still credited as executive producer.)

We see nearly every scene of the first episode through Naz's eyes, and so we understand, like he does, that all the evidence points to him committing a horrific crime. Narrative logic and Naz's character (a sheltered but good kid, basically) makes it unlikely that he killed the victim, but he has no way of fully convincing anyone, even himself, that he didn't do it. That leaves him in the same spot as the protagonist in Kafka's The Trial: forced to answer for a crime that he can't be sure he's innocent of, but determined to fight the charges all the same. Kafka dealt in allegorical abstraction, however; The Night Of is shaping up to be about the brutal realities of being a defendant in the American criminal justice system. That's the dark underbelly of Law & Order—after that last "dun-dun" and fade out, every case leaves behind a lot of broken lives.

Like any mystery show, you can expend mental energy concocting theories about The Night Of, imagining the whodunnit options, or debate the logic of various characters' actions. If the first episode is any indication, viewers hungry for plot should find the nearest Law & Order rerun instead. So far,The Night Of is not about whether Naz committed the murder, but a more terrifying question: What if it doesn't matter whether he did or not?

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.