Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Seven Seconds’, A Netflix Drama About A Racially-Charged Police Cover-Up

We were fans of Veena Sud’s previous show, The Killing, but it was a love-hate relationship that we shared with many fans and critics. Sud is back with the Netflix drama Seven Seconds; is it as good-but-frustrating as her previous show?

SEVEN SECONDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of what we assume is Liberty State Park in Jersey City, given the fact that we see the back of the Statue of Liberty and the lower Manhattan skyline from across the Hudson River. An SUV drives down a snowy road in the park, with a guy on the phone, worried that he can’t get in touch with his pregnant wife.

The Gist: The guy on the phone is worried because he hasn’t heard from her; as he gets off the phone with one of their friends, he hits something and skids out in the snow. He walks out of the SUV, trying to see what happened. He sees the wheels of a bike under the car and realizes he hit someone.

He calls his co-workers for help. Those co-workers are cops; you see, Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) is a detective in the Jersey City PD’s narcotics division. His commander, Mike Diangelo (David Lyons), walks over to where the kid is lying and sees it’s a black teenager; he immediately tells his guys to start covering up evidence, and he tells Jablonski to drive away like nothing happened. He feels that, even if it was an accident, the optics of a white cop killing a black kid will just make things horrible for Jablonski, as well as his division.

Meanwhile, we see Latrice Butler (Regina King), a parochial middle-school teacher, rush to church choir practice after spending some time helping a teenager find her sixth-grade brother. Her husband Isaiah (Russell Hornsby) is playing piano. When they get home, there’s a message from the police: their son Brenton has been in an accident. They rush to the hospital to find out he’s in surgery. Jablonski, wracked with guilt, goes to the crime scene when he hears about it on his radio, and he’s shocked to hear the kid is still alive.

We also see assistant prosecutor KJ Harper (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who likes to get her drink on and is very much in a mode where she doesn’t give a shit about her job anymore, get called in on this hit-and-run. The cops have a suspect, a homeless man who lives in his car, and he’s already being questioned by Det. Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley), who just moved to J.C. from the big city across the river. They visit the Butlers in the hospital, and go look at the homeless guy’s impounded car. Something about this doesn’t feel right, and KJ misses the arraignment because she’s at the crime scene, trying to figure out what really happened.

Our Take: Seven Seconds is based on a Russian film, and it’s interesting that the locale has been shifted not to New York or other major city, but to Jersey City, NJ. As a smaller city that’s across the river from New York, its got its own share of problems and racial tensions, but the scale is definitely more intimate. We wonder why that choice was made by the show’s creator, executive producer and writer, Veena Sud; is it because of Hudson County’s history of corruption? Is it just because it’s a city but smaller? Either way, it’s a fascinating choice.

All of the acting in the pilot is top notch. We’ll watch Regina King do pretty much anything, so watching her as the injured teen’s aggrieved mother was the highlight of the pilot, especially scenes where she and Isaiah question where Brenton got the expensive bike and why he was in the park. Her interaction with Isaiah’s brother Seth (Zackary Momoh), whose return from deployment is dampened by his nephew’s accident, is also interesting to watch, as it seems the two of them have a longer history than initially thought. Ashitey and Mosley have good chemistry as the ad hoc partners who start to figure out what really happened; Ashitey does an especially good job portraying someone who has seen too much and now is just trying to figure out how to manage in her job and life.

It all looks great, and the snowy motif makes a harsh environment dark and dreamy all at once. But we thought all of that about Sud’s previous show, The Killing, and we came away after four seasons annoyed and frustrated with how much we were jerked around by Sud’s penchant for red herrings, false finales, narrative dead ends, and head-smacking plot twists. We’re afraid this will happen on Seven Seconds, already shown a mini red herring or two as we figure out who the kid who Jablonski hit is. Also, her stylistic choice to not show Brenton, either on the crime scene or in the hospital, until the very end of the pilot, built up an expectation that was never delivered upon.

However, two things are in this show’s favor: There will be a new story every season and it’s on Netflix. Anyone who watched The Killing on the streaming service had a lot better viewing experience than the people (like us) who watched the first three seasons week-to-week on AMC, and it seems like Sud’s writing is well suited for binge-watching. Let’s hope that’s the case here.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Harper standing over the massive blood stain in the snow where Brenton was found, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. 

Sleeper Star: Felix Castillo as Det. Felix Osorio is an interesting presence; at first he seems like he’ll follow the lead of his boss, Det. Diangelo, but might have a lot of regrets doing it.

Most Pilot-y Line: “They’re going to fuck you for Ferguson, Chicago, Baltimore, for every white cop who kills a black kid,” Diagnelo tells Jablonski after he gets wind that Jablonski was thinking of admitting to the accident. Uh, yeah, we got his viewpoint when he decided to cover things up at the beginning of the episode.

Our Call: Stream It. We recommend it with the caveat that we have no idea where Sud will be going with this story, and with her history, we’re not sure we want to invest the time, only to get no payoff. But the visuals and acting are so good, that it’s worth watching just for that. Dammit, Veena, you sucked us in again!

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Seven Seconds on Netflix