2016 - 2016
The Night Of is an eight-episode HBO limited series that ran across July and August 2016, adapted from the 2008 BBC drama Criminal Justice. Richard Price and Steven Zaillian developed it for American television, and the pilot was directed by James Gandolfini, who died before production fully began. Gandolfini remains credited as an executive producer. The John Stone role was originally written for him.
A Pakistani-American college student in Queens borrows his father's taxi to drive to a party he has no business attending. A young woman gets in the cab. They spend the night together. He wakes up downstairs in her brownstone with no memory of the last few hours and finds her upstairs, stabbed to death. He runs. He is arrested. What follows is a slow, procedural account of what the American criminal justice system does to someone once it has decided it has its man.
The show resists the usual shape of a TV murder story. There is no breathless investigation racing toward truth. There is no detective hero. There is a process, and the process grinds on regardless of what actually happened that night.
Riz Ahmed plays Nasir "Naz" Khan and the performance remade his career. You watch a bright, mild college kid walk into a police station convinced cooperation will save him and then you watch what Rikers does to his face, his posture, his voice across eight hours. It is one of the quietest transformations you will see on TV.
John Turturro plays John Stone, the bottom-feeding defence attorney who finds Naz at the precinct and refuses to let go of him. Stone advertises his services on the back of phone books, wears sandals because his eczema is too painful for shoes, and argues his cases in small claims courts for minor fees. Turturro walked into a role that Gandolfini had been developing for years and made it entirely his own. He was Emmy nominated. It is the best work of his career.
Bill Camp plays Detective Dennis Box, the quiet, exhausted investigator close to retirement who assembles the case against Naz. Camp won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor and you can see why in almost every scene. He plays Box as patient and thorough and slightly sad about his own competence.
Michael Kenneth Williams plays Freddy Knight, a Rikers veteran who takes Naz under his wing for reasons that are never fully explained and probably cannot be. Williams died in 2021 and Freddy sits in the middle of a run of extraordinary work that also includes Omar in The Wire and Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire. The scenes between Williams and Ahmed are among the most tense and tender things HBO has put on screen.
The supporting bench is loaded. Jeannie Berlin is prosecutor Helen Weiss, direct and unflashy and very good. Peyman Moaadi and Poorna Jagannathan play Naz's parents, carrying the immigrant-family grief that sits under the whole series. Glenne Headly plays a second defence lawyer. Sofia Black-D'Elia appears early as Andrea Cornish. Paulo Costanzo is the prison doctor.
Michael Kenneth Williams
Freddy Knight
Sofia Black-D'Elia
Andrea Cornish
Bill Camp
Detective Dennis Box
Peyman Moaadi
Salim Khan
Poorna Jagannathan
Safar Khan
Richard Price
Co-Creator / Writer
Glenne Headly
Alison Crowe
Steven Zaillian
Co-Creator / Writer / Director
The case is the engine. The subject is everything around the case.
Watch what the system does to Naz between the cab and the courtroom. The paperwork. The fingerprinting. The strip search, filmed in one long unbroken take that refuses to let you look away. The holding cell. The transport van. The first night on Rikers. Price and Zaillian are interested in the machinery of American criminal justice as a machine, and what happens to a person when the machine closes around them.
Stone's eczema is the show's clearest metaphor and also its most human detail. His skin flares up when the stress is bad. He soaks his feet in basins of Crisco. He tries every pharmacy treatment and every folk remedy. The condition turns his body into a visible record of how much the work costs him. It is also just a thing some people actually live with, and Turturro plays the daily annoyance of it as carefully as he plays the legal strategy.
Then there is the cat. Andrea Cornish's cat, orphaned by the crime, gets picked up by animal services. Stone visits the shelter, refuses to take the cat, visits again, refuses again, and eventually cannot stop himself. The cat is played for small laughs and small heartbreaks across the series and is one of the most quietly affecting through-lines on the show.
Shot on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the series has a specificity of place that almost no other prestige drama matches. Steven Zaillian, who directed most of the episodes himself, keeps the camera patient. Scenes breathe. The soundtrack is sparse. Conversations happen at real speed.
There is a procedural discipline here that comes straight from Price's long fiction work. He wrote Clockers and Freedomland and contributed to The Wire, and his ear for how cops, lawyers, defendants, and families actually talk is in every scene. The dialogue never rises to TV-speech. It stays on the ground. People interrupt each other. People trail off. People say the wrong thing and then try to walk it back.
The show was nominated for thirteen Emmys and won five. It was the kind of limited-series event that HBO used to produce more often before streaming fragmented the audience. Ahmed became a star. Turturro got his best notices in twenty years. Bill Camp joined the ranks of character actors everybody suddenly knew the name of.
You will have an opinion about the verdict. You will not have the last word on it.
This is the part of the show people still argue about a decade later. I will not tell you what the jury says. I will tell you that the writers refuse to hand you a clean answer about whether Naz did it or did not do it, and that refusal is the whole ethical point of the series. If the show told you flatly that he was innocent, it would become a wrongful-conviction melodrama. If it told you flatly that he was guilty, it would become a "system works" story. It does neither. It lets the ambiguity stand because the ambiguity is what happens in real cases.
Fans of Mare of Easttown and True Detective will find a sibling here, and anyone who loved The Wire should treat this as mandatory viewing on the Price resume alongside We Own this City. It is HBO in its limited-series prime. Eight hours, no filler, no sequel bait, no spin-off. Just a serious piece of television about what America does to a young man when a young woman ends up dead in her own bed.
John Turturro
John Stone
James Gandolfini
Pilot Director / Executive Producer
Riz Ahmed
Nasir "Naz" Khan
Paulo Costanzo
Dr. Katz
Jeannie Berlin
Helen Weiss