It’s tempting when you’re watching a glossy TV series centering on the criminal justice system like Law & Order or CSI to assume that everything works meticulously well and that its very inhabitants from the police through to the crime scene investigation teams and lawyers work together as a harmonious whole.
The reality obviously is quite different – nothing is ever as good as it looks on TV much as we’d like to believe that it is – and that is nowhere more apparent at the moment that on HBO’s eight part series The Night Of (based on a 2008-09 British series, Criminal Justice).
In this limited series created by Richard Price and Steve Zaillian, the cops are short-tempered, overstretched and possibly underpaid, the directives of the crime scene investigation teams are routinely ignored and the detectives are committed but jaundiced.
It’s not that people aren’t doing their jobs well, although you suspect there is a literal observance of the letter of the law and nothing more; it’s simply that resources are stretched thin and everyone involved long ago gave up any pretense that they are involved in any kind of noble endeavour, any righting of wrongs that means a damn.
It’s into this less than ideal world that Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed), a geeky but handsome Pakistani-American college student tumbles one night when a simple quest to go to a party in Manhattan goes disastrously wrong.
Pleased to have been invited to attend the party by one of the jocks that he provides academic support to, Naz takes his dad’s taxi cab without permission, only discovering enroute to a party that he can’t turn the availability light off.
This leads to a succession of irritable New Yorkers climbing into the taxi expecting to be taking to their destination; all are ejected by various means with only the beautiful but troubled Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black D’Elia) being allowed to stay for obvious means.
Naz is awkward yes but thrilled that Andrea is paying him any kind of attention and so goes along, often reluctantly but eventually always of his own volition, on a night that includes copious amounts of drugs and alcohol and sex, none of which, you get the impression, Naz routinely takes in.
In fact, he admits later to police that Andrea is only the second girl he’s ever slept with, a level of social interaction in keeping with his reticent personality and the dictates of his loving but observant Pakistani family headed by dad Salim (Peyman Moaadi) and mum Safar (Poorna Jagannathan).
This is the story then of a man way out of his depth but secretly loving every moment of it, even if every step he takes is laden with initial doubt and hesitation.
As it turns out, he has every right to feel cautious, even if he fails to act on those feelings, with his big night out on the town turning into a nightmare when he goes back upstairs, after waking up in the kitchen dressed only in his T-shirt and underpants, to find Andrea dead in the bed, awash in a sea of blood and punctuated by multiple stabs and scratches.
What follows is the story of what happens to a person accused of a crime, when they’re plunged into a system that grinds dispassionately on, self-perpetuating and effective to an extent but no longer congisant of the ideals that underpin it or the people whose fates rest solely on it.
Naz is a man, innocence staunchly maintained, who finds himself overwhelmed with the urge to run – a strategy which doesn’t pay off for him and naturally only makes things worse; those you can understand why someone, shocked at the turn their life has taken in one night, would do that, with Ahmed doing a brilliant job of conveying panic, confusion and an addled sense of purpose all at once – but simultaneously caught up in a system that wants an outcome come what may.
The Night Of expertly draws its audience in, employing a languorous unspooling of events that well near matches the machinations of the criminal justice system from the initial arrest to the interminable wait for both alleged perpetrators and witnesses to have their stories heard.
Nothing moves quickly in the criminal justice system and the show matches that pace expertly while keeping the tension taught and giving us slowly-percolating drama whose intensity belies the carefully-paced narrative.
Visually, The Night Of is beguiling, with CCTV footage and long lingering shots of the various people Naz and Andrea interact with generously employed to give us a sense that it is well near impossible to escape scrutiny in our hyper-connected, 24/7 age where telltale signs of our activities is just a mouse click or street cam away.
There’s an omnipresence to the entire look and feel of the show, which is meant to give you a sense that no matter how hard Naz tries to protest his innocence that an array of witnesses, CCTV cameras and seemingly meaningless interactions are all screaming guilty at the top of their lungs.
You’re left guessing about whether Naz is guilty or not, with a thousand different possibilities on offer, and it begins to seems as if only the accused’s lawyer, a grizzled but nonetheless committed lawyer called John Stone (played superlatively by John Turturro in fine form as always), is convinced of his client’s innocence, or at least the possibility that he might be innocent.
The Night Of, a sumptuous tale that is less a police procedural or courtroom drama than the gritty portrayal of a well-intentioned system gone awry, leaves you guessing all the way, content to let its deliciously slow storyline unfurl at its own rewarding pace, all too aware that it bears more resemblance to the vagaries of real world justice than any of the slick network crime shows that usually dominate the ratings.