‘The Night Of’ Recap: Disorder in the Court

Six episodes in, two episodes to go, and it’s time to admit it: I don’t understand The Night Of. Like, at all. I don’t understand its pacing — what happens, and when, and for how long. I don’t understand its characters — who gets centered, and when, and what we do or don’t learn about them. I don’t understand the dividing lines between episodes — why last week’s installment ended with John Stone in a dark basement with a lead pipe in his hand and a convict on the run, only for nothing to come of it, and why this week’s ended with him looking at a personal trainer possibly putting the moves on a client of a certain age with a hip-hop song based on Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” playing on the soundtrack. I don’t know why every black man is menacing. I don’t know why every decision Naz makes is transparently idiotic. I don’t know why it continues to pull casting stunts with HBO veterans — all rise for the Honorable Yellow King presiding, for example. I can’t even begin to fathom its fascination with John Stone’s feet — maybe the single biggest discrepancy between the time and effort placed into a plot element by a show and its emotional, thematic, and narrative payoff for the audience. For me, at least, the mystery at the center of The Night Of — including last night’s episode, “Samson and Delilah” — is what the hell The Night Of is trying to do. For a miniseries that’s 75% complete, that’s a bad place to be.

The pacing issues are the most fundamental, I think, given how deep we are into the story. For example, the show has slowly seeded fully three alternate theories of the crime for which Naz is being tried: If he didn’t murder Andrea, it could have been her sleazy stepfather, or the incredible disappearing witness who was there when Bodie from The Wire shouted racial slurs at Naz on the sidewalk before they entered her building, or, as of this episode, the batshit crazy misogynist mortician who saw them at the gas station and gave Chandra the scare of her life. But I don’t understand the storytelling logic behind introducing them in this weird, spasmodic way. The missing witness was an obvious suspect from the moment the camera lingered on him as he stared silently at Andrea in the pilot, but it took until last episode for anyone to catch up with him, at which point it devolved into that absurd chase scene with John Stone in his flip-flops.

There was no payoff for that at all this week, needless to say. What there was, instead, was a portentous quote-unquote cliffhanger in which John spied on Andrew’s black-widower physical-trainer stepfather spotting his latest lovely elderly client. There are two hours to go, so who knows, but as of right now actor Paul Sparks’s prodigious gifts have been wasted in this role, if this is the payoff for his presence on the show.

And as for Suspect #3, the Evil Mortician…I mean, what is there to say, other than that I thought The Night Of had more than filled its quota for terrifying black men? Yet here we are, watching poor Chandra face the thousand-yard stare of a guy who’s perfectly happy to tell total strangers that women are fundamentally vampiric and should be destroyed before they can do any more damage. John lectures her about chasing witnesses on her own, despite, you know, doing the exact same thing himself last week. I’d be willing to chalk that up to his own personal inconsistency instead of that of the show if there’d been any follow-up to his big cat-and-mouse sequence whatsoever.

What about our main man, Naz? Jeez, don’t ask. This dumbass literally gets his knuckles tattooed with “SIN” and “BAD” the week of his trial — always a good look for the judge and jury — and picks up a heroin-smoking habit to boot, because why not?

Meanwhile Detective Box, who feels more and more like a refugee from a better show that was destroyed in a superhero-comic style apocalypse and fled to our world from a dying universe, discovers that once upon a time Naz pushed a racist bully down the stairs, effectively destroying his good-kid image even if all he was doing was reacting to the rancid Islamophobia of the post-9/11 world, to which the show has gone to such painstaking lengths to demonstrate, if only from black people for some reason. I suppose that when you tie these two plot threads together you’re supposed to think “Gee, maybe Naz is guilty after all,” but all I can think is “Guilty or not, he’s acting like a goddamn idiot, and we’ve been told time and time again that ‘smart’ is his defining characteristic.” By the time he idiotically lingers at the window of a closed door behind which two of his guardian Freddy’s goons are having sex, despite the screechingly obvious dangers of getting caught looking, you have to wonder if writer/creators Steven Zaillian and Richard Price have half the faith in this kid’s intelligence that all of his friends and family do.

That inconsistency is ultimately the most frustrating thing about the show. Every insightful moment, like the importance of wearing the right color shirt in court, is undercut by some separate act of stupidity, like Naz rejecting Freddy’s advice about this despite him being right about everything else. Every compelling character beat, like John Stone rattling off a beautifully cynical list of potential jurors the defense team should reject because they’d be too partial to the prosecution, is immediately undone by some bizarre unearned instant of intimacy, like Chandra telling John she’d broken up with her boyfriend out of the blue, even though we’d never so much as heard of this guy before. Every smart storytelling choice, like the razor-sharp, drum-tight editing of the courtroom sequence, is overshadowed by, like Chandra ordering takeout and the delivery guy is Naz’s dad, out of all the delivery guys in the five boroughs. What are you supposed to do with this kind of absurd contrivance?

But hey, if nothing else, John’s eczema has cleared up. If it doesn’t recur by the time the series is over I’ll eat his scabs, of course, but for the moment I’ll take whatever relief from this show’s bizarre storytelling priorities I can get.

[Watch the “Samson and Delilah” episode of The Night Of on HBO Go or HBO Now]
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.