The Day After "The Night Of"

"The Night Of", HBO's 8-part crime drama, wrapped up last night. There's been a lot of high praise written and said about the show, enough to just about guarantee it gets an Emmy nod for best limited series. For my part, the show passed the admittedly low bar I demanded of it - fill the gap in my television viewing during that lull in the year between the "Game of Thrones" and the start of the fall TV season. 

I'm going to skip right over one of the most glaring problems with the show: the title itself, which I find to be awful. It's even less evocative than some other poorly named shows I can think of - like The Wire (which stops having anything to do with wire-tapping after season one) and Breaking Bad (what the fuck does that even mean?) come to  mind. But there's not time to dwell on this, I must move on.

For those that haven't gotten around to seeing it yet, "The Night Of" stars John Turturro as attorney John Stone, and John Turturro's feet as John Stone's eczema-riddled feet. The show is a gripping account of one man's battle with an ugly and itchy skin disease, and the many methods in which he tries to cope with it. There's also a sub-plot in there about some twenty-something kid that winds up getting arrested for a crime that he didn't commit (or at least has no memory of committing) but this story-line largely takes a back seat to the eczema thing. 

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but the thing is, not by a whole hell of a lot. I'd say that easily, about a quarter of each episode is eaten up by screen time devoted to John Stone's skin condition - enough to the point that it becomes annoying, if not comical, to have to sit through. It's the kind of thing that could possibly be forgiven if it added any to the overall story, but unless it turns out that Stone's eczema is the real killer (Spoiler alert - it wasn't), it just serves as a distraction. 

Outside of that problem, the show just doesn't really offer that much that's new. John Stone is a frumpy but capable lawyer, Nasir Khan (played by Riz Ahmed) is a soft-spoken and naive kid turned hardened inmate, he's arrested and investigated by a grizzled and cynical detective, and is taken under the wing of a powerful and influential cell mate who sees something in him. Now, for the most part, that's territory that other shows and movies have covered, and more effectively. "The Night Of" feels to me as if it's trying to be too many things at once - prison show, courtroom procedural, whodunit mystery - and not really doing a great job at any of them.

That's not to say that the show is all misses and no hits. Bill Camp's performance as Detective Box is praiseworthy, and the plight that the situation throws Nasir's parents into is genuinely compelling. The show isn't perfect, but it gets it right just enough to have garnered the positive attention that it has...which, as I alluded to earlier, could in fact be because it's running during a time of the year when TV offerings are a little lean and leaving viewers hungry for anything they can sink their teeth into, and if it's not particularly nourishing, it'll at least pass the time. 

I've read a lot about the idea that it doesn't matter if Nasir is guilty, or who it was that committed the murder he is on trial for, but what matters is what the show has to say about the criminal justice system - whatever the hell it is that it's trying to say. I can technically agree with that sentiment, because to me those things really don't matter, although perhaps for different reasons.