‘The Night Of’: A Juicy, Riveting New Crime Drama

Photo: HBO

A completely engrossing murder mystery, courtroom drama, and family saga, The Night Of, premiering Sunday on HBO, is a miniseries to enjoy, think about, and debate. As an HBO viewer who’s not a rabid Game of Thrones fan, I think it’s the strongest drama the channel has programmed since it introduced The Leftovers.

The Night Of tells the story of Nasir Khan (Nightcrawler’s Riz Ahmed), a New York City college student who, after picking up a woman he’d never met before, does drugs and has sex with her — and wakes up to find her bloody corpse. With no memory of what happened — but sure he didn’t do it — Nasir panics and flees the crime scene. He’s arrested and brought to a police precinct, where a low-rent hustler of a lawyer, Jack Stone (John Turturro) offers to represent him. Booked, charged with murder, and shipped off to jail while awaiting trial, Nasir is taken under the wing of a powerfully influential convict played by HBO stalwart Michael K. Williams (The Wire, Boardwalk Empire).

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The Night Of is crammed with terrific performances. The superb character actor Bill Camp plays police detective Dennis Box, a cop closing in on retirement who’s wily and funny and mean and, to all appearances, unshakably honest. (I’d watch a weekly series with Camp in this role: Detective Box has a nice, iambic ring to it.) Jeannie Berlin, who made her initial impact in the 1970s in movies such as The Heartbreak Kid, is superb as a district attorney who recognizes that this case, which most of the media considers a slam-dunk conviction, is actually more nuanced and tricky to prosecute.

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The Night Of was originally a project James Gandolfini was slated to star in, playing Stone. Based on a 2008 British series called Criminal Justice, HBO’s version was Americanized by the novelist Richard Price (Clockers) and filmmaker-screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List); Gandolfini filmed the pilot episode before he died in 2013. Slipping into the role of the lawyer, Turturro has a great time with all the jaded cynicism a lifetime of disappointment has brought Jack Stone. Stone is a smart man, a shrewd man, and a loser from head to toe — and those toes and his feet suffer from an appalling case of eczema, which becomes an artful combination of running gag and cosmic damnation.

Price and Zaillian have added a significant element in adapting this British drama by making the accused a Pakistani-American whose striving parents (his father is a cab driver, an occupation of huge importance to the plot) have pinned their hopes on this son as a potential success story. Some of the most moving moments of The Night Of involve Nasir’s parents — played by Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan — scrounging for money to pay for legal representation and unexpected costs.

There are a couple of elements that would have made The Night Of, as excellent as it is, better. Based on the seven (out of eight) episodes HBO made available for review, and without going into detail, I’ll say that at a crucial point in the proceedings, much of the pleasure of seeing a key character featured prominently in the courtroom scenes is withheld from us. (Again, I haven’t seen the eighth and final episode — maybe this character goes full-bore Jimmy Stewart, Anatomy of a Murder glorious at the very end. We shall see.)

I also wish — and I know how crazy this sounds in this era of Too Much TV — that The Night Of was longer, that it had more episodes. I wanted to see more about the police detective work, with Box piecing together this puzzle. I wanted to see more of Berlin’s district attorney, under pressure to construct an airtight conviction plan. I wanted to see more from the slew of terrific supporting players, such as Glenne Headly as a classier attorney than Stone, one who wants to represent Nasir for the high media profile the case would bring to her. As it is, The Night Of boasts some super-fine actors in the tiniest of roles: Ben Shenkman is a one-man production of Barney Miller as a precinct desk sergeant; Fisher Stevens exhibits wonderful, dry dubiousness as a seen-it-all pharmacist who’s surprised by Stone’s wide variety of eczema prescriptions.

While the theme of The Night Of is a big downer — the justice system is creaky, prone to error and prejudice — it arrives in a big, happy package for viewers: weeks of pleasure, watching excellent performers reciting rich, vivid dialogue, filmed with the luxurious skill of an elaborate theatrical movie.

The Night Of premieres Sunday, July 10, at 9 p.m. on HBO.