Spoilers: Some thoughts on the conclusion of The Night Of

The HBO 8-part series The Night Of is engaging right to the end. Spoilers here inevitably: i was half-right in foreseeing how this would work out, in that the defense of Naz, accused of murdering a young woman w/ who he'd had a one-night relationship, would focus on establishing the existence of other possible suspects whom the police did not identify or pursue. Some of these were obvious to any careful viewer from the outset - though I also knew that none of these folks would be charged with the crime. As foreseen, the ending is dark, with Naz exonerated (hung jury, and state declines to pursue a 2nd trial) and now a drug addict and a street thug, thanks to his time in Riker's and he changes he made to survive there. I had thought he would be acquitted and then would have memories of actually killing the young woman - but he comes off as still innocent yet a victim of the system, and that's probably a better ending than the one I'd envisioned. (Under cross-examination, he does for the first time say that the doesn't know whether he killed the woman; that's about as close as the story comes to a possible admission of guilt.) I'm a little troubled by the development in the final episode that suggests the woman's financial adviser had been stealing from her and that he had possibly been the killer and that the DA will pursue indicting him; this leaves the door open a crack for a possible sequel - which I doubt will happen - and seems a little too pat an opportunistic. They'd have done better, in my view, to just leave it w/ the possibility of 4 other killers rather than suggest that the financial adviser is definitely the man

The tragedy of The Night Of - possible exculpation, but a ruined life

The HBO series The Night Of continues to hold our interest through disc 2/episode 6: It's an odd but effective narration in that we know more than the central characters, but over the course of the episodes, particularly 4 through 6, they begin to figure out the alternate potential narrative: If Naz did not kill the young woman, as he insists, then who did? By the end of episode 6 there are (at least) 3 additional suspects, at least in the minds of Naz's attorneys (at least 2 of them had already aroused our suspicions). But while they are making these heroic efforts to create reasonable doubt and exculpate Naz, Naz himself is ever more deeply drawn into the criminal underworld and gang culture of the prison (Riker's Island), so what we're heading toward is a tragic conclusion in which he may get off but his life is ruined - a true expose of the system of criminal justice in the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere, as it's based on a British program).

A miniseries and a move that expose the horrors of the system of so-called criminal justice

Based on 1st 3 episodes (out of 8) of The Night Of, the 2016 HBO miniseries from Steven Zaillian and the great crime writer Richard Price, this looks like a terrific, and terrifying, examination of the criminal-justice system as seen through one case in which things go horribly wrong for the protagonist: a 23-year-old man (Naz), of Pakistani descent but U.S. born, an excellent student in college, takes his dad's cab, without permission, to drive to a downtown party, but gets waylaid when a girl hops into his cab, takes her home, they engage in some Rx and alcohol consumption, way out of the Naz's league, then violent sex; Naz seems to pass out of black out and when he wakes finds that the young woman has been stabbed to death. Frightened, he runs off but is soon picked up on DWI suspicion, and once the cops connect him to the crime scene he's toast: his blood and DNA are all over the place, he doesn't and can't deny being present, claims he blacked out and has no idea how the woman was killed. Here are my thoughts: Price does a great job providing subtle clues as to who might actually have murdered the woman. We see two black men exchange angry words w/ Naz as he is about to enter the woman's apartment; she leaves a back door open by mistake - so naturally we think one of the men must have killed her. Of course this plays off our racial biases - the Pakistani seems so nice and kind, the black guy so menacing. My guess is that these are red herrings and that we learn later in the series that Naz was guilty, that the Rx caused him to become violent and then to black out. Just my guess. Meanwhile, we see throughout the first 3 episodes at least the failings of the criminal-justice system - the pressure on the kid to plea to a lesser charge, the difficulty in getting good counsel, the terrifying conditions under which he's held (w/out bail) while awaiting trial. I was not surprised to see on IMDB that this drama is based on an English show, Criminal Justice, and I want to remind anyone reading this that friend AW wrote and directed a great HBO movie of the same title that similarly exposes the horrors of the judicial system based on the facts and suppositions of one criminal case.