You wouldn't know it, but we're five-eighths of the way through The Night Of, HBO's limited miniseries about a young Pakistani-American man accused of murder (and his lawyer's nearly debilitating foot eczema). Despite the series being more than half over, it's still not clear where the show is going or on what terms.
It could end up somewhere good or even great. After all, the series has gorgeous cinematography, top-notch acting, and some weirdly electrifying set pieces on the long aisles and grey walls and dull spaces and long waits that constitute criminal justice. But the pace is baffling: Instead of building to a crisis or conclusion, the show seems to be wandering through different moods and plots and possibilities and introducing characters who are developing on a geological timescale incompatible with the three episodes the show has left. (It's a shame, because some of them are terrific. Jeannie Berlin's performance as prosecutor Helen Weiss has me wishing for a spinoff.)
The show itself seems unsure of what it is. Is The Night Of a whodunit? A noir riff on Serial? A simple remake? An ode to Oz? Previews suggested it might be a muscular drama in which attorney John Stone (played by John Turturro) and defendant Nasir Khan (played by Riz Ahmed) sat across a table in prison and played chess with the truth. The first episode (told largely from Nasir's point of view) felt more like a stylized psychological thriller about the experience of being framed and swallowed up by the system. The second reframed the central tension as Stone's power struggle with the detective in charge of the case, Dennis Box (with Naz as sacrificial victim).
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But The Night Of doesn't dive deeper into any of these premises. Instead, it just gets more and more diffuse, sloughing subplots the way Stone's feet shed old skin. Sometimes it seems to settle into the firm pessimism of the conventional procedural. Sometimes it attempts a contrarian anthropology of prison life. But so far, it isn't delivering on — or even really pursuing — any of those premises.
Look, there's something to be said for playing coy with your genre. But The Night Of is so unwilling to settle into any legible identity that its characters are similarly afflicted. Viewers might remember John Stone's emphatic speech when Naz tried to explain what happened on the night of the murder: "I don't want to be stuck with the truth," Stone said. "Not till I have to be." In fact, the main reason Naz was vulnerable to Detective Box, who wanted him to talk, was that speech. Stone throttled Naz's impulse to confess and specifically excluded the truth from their relationship.
Viewers might have shared my surprise, then, when Stone got huffy with Naz in Sunday's episode (claiming Naz failed to inform him that he took Adderall). "You're lying," he says to Naz. Turturro plays this with an agonized look that suggested a major betrayal, which seemed unreasonable and inappropriate given his earlier instructions. But I think the show was siding with Turturro there; we were supposed to echo his hurt.
There are other puzzles. Why, for instance, does Chandra seem to feel so strongly about Nasir? And why was she so surprised that he might have lied to them? (And, again, had he? This felt far from clear to me.) And really: She's never heard of Ketamine? Exactly how innocent were attorneys at high-powered law firms in 2014? Are sex workers disappointed when johns fail to perform sexually? And why are we even on that empty subplot when we could be with the Khans, whose story is so much more relevant? The less said about that implausible chase scene, the better.
Most puzzling of all, though, is the show's reliance on repetition when it really should trust its material. Did we need to see both the prosecution and the defense literally looking at the words "Good Boy" (in one case crossing it out) to understand that the story is more complicated? How many scenes will it take for the show to feel it's really proven that others see Stone as a loser? Or to trust that we understand that there's a symbolic aspect to all the jokey attention to his feet and his appearance and the murdered victim's cat? (HE PUT THE CAT IN HIS SON'S OLD BEDROOM. HE IS ALLERGIC TO CATS.) As symbols go, these aren't very interesting — mainly because Stone isn't quite big or interesting enough to anchor this show the way it seems he's supposed to. Or, to put it another way, The Night Of has too many other interesting players for him to remain in focus, but their airtime keeps getting sacrificed to Stone's feet. We get it: He has eczema.
As it moves into its last three episodes, I'm hoping The Night Of gives us more of its strongest pairings — Box and Weiss, Mr. and Mrs. Khan — and more of the great dialogue that makes the show unique (as opposed to the kind of investigative work that makes it conventional). But above all, here's hoping it prunes some of its branches so it can actually deliver on some of the many great premises it established at the outset.
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