The following recap includes plot details from the premiere of “The Night Of.”
The opening credits of “The Night Of” are a surrealistically dreary pastiche of images — an ecstasy pill; a bloodied hand, the black-polished fingers bearing cheap silver rings; a lone cab parked under a bridge — that will bear great significance throughout the course of the new HBO limited series. As each image rises and recedes, ghost-white against a grainy black, I’m reminded of the nightmare splendor of the opening credits for “True Detective,” HBO’s last foray into crime drama, an attempt at a franchise that ultimately succumbed to its own pretentiousness. In episode one, titled “The Beach,” “The Night Of” establishes itself as decidedly uninterested in grandiloquent passages about time as a flat circle or bizarre dream sequences that seem like they missed their left turn into Twin Peaks; it is a workman-like whodunit (or, more apt, a did-he-really-do-it?) and a somber meditation on the hellishness of the slow-grinding bureaucracy of the criminal justice system. Its focus on character, along with the show’s pedigree (it counts the celebrated crime novelist and contributor to “The Wire,” Richard Price, and the late James Gandolfini, among its executive producers), makes it a particularly well-constructed and beautifully varnished piece of workmanship.
From the introduction of our central character, Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani-American college student from a good family, we know that the show will mostly shade fresh nuance into familiar story beats: Naz is a good-natured naïf of a kid, the kind of guy who tutors the basketball team and wishes that he had the height and the talent to take the court — or to talk to girls (when he hears one player mention an ex-fiancé, Naz exclaims, in utter awe, that “he has game.”). His immigrant parents, Salim and Safar (played by Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan), often fall off the fine line between insulating their children from a cruel, capricious world, and smothering them. Naz is so desperate to get to “a team party” that he commits the quintessentially teenage transgression that will, before the episode’s end, find him calling home from the grimy smallness of a jail cell — he steals his father’s cab. Only he doesn’t know how to shut down the cab’s “off duty” light (of course he doesn’t), and soon, a slinky, Goth-lite femme fatale (whose name, Andrea, we will only discover after her death) finds her way into his back seat, insisting that she wants to see “the beach” (they settle for an impromptu conversation by a river instead).
This particular scene, and the sequence of scenes that come after it — flirtation and seduction, tasting the forbidden fruits of illicit substances, and the rough and risqué sex (she has a predilection for knife play) that seems like it will be an oh-my-God-you-will-not-believe-this-shit story for the guys in the locker room until it ends with the early morning discovery of her sliced-up corpse in the blood-sopped sheets — have the potential to seem rather rote, a casual doomsday instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing familiarity with the crime genre. However, the show invests them with a freshness that comes mostly from the performances — and from the way that certain small details accumulate, their repetition creating a palpable dread.
Riz Ahmed has a coltish handsomeness that serves as an appealing, and highly mutable, palette: Naz is wholly believable — and, more importantly, remarkably sympathetic — as he careens from nebbish to boy-gone-wild to the poor, hapless mope who builds the case against himself through one stupid, impulsive action after the next. Upon waking and discovering his momentary paramour dead, he flees the house, then breaks back into the house where he grabs the bloodied knife and puts it in his jacket pocket, where it is eventually discovered by the beat cop who pulls him over for making an overwide left turn.
For fans of “The Wire” or its predecessor and spiritual kinsman, “Homicide: Life on the Street,” watching the police procedural portion of this episode is like slipping on a well-worn pair of boots: comfortable and able to carry you quite far. As Detective Box, the lead homicide investigator, Bill Camp possesses the kind of rumpled cunning that has allowed many a perp to feel safe, that maybe this cop isn’t like the others, and he’ll be genuinely unburdened if he just opens up, just a little — but when we’ve seen Jimmy McNulty or Meldrick Lewis play master interrogator and father confessor, we’ve always been squarely in the lawman’s perspective. “The Night Of” treats these scenes as a volley between Box and Naz — allowing Camp to imbue his gumshoe with a potent sense of menace. He wants his man and he wants to go home. And in truth, given the overwhelming evidence against Naz, one can hardly blame him.
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