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The Night Of


Jrag

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Not sure if anyone else has seen this yet, but you eventually will because it's that good.

Serious Wire vibes here even though the story is going to be much more confined obviously. Can't wait for ep 2.

Turturro, Riz Ahmed and the dude playing Detective Box (what's his name?) all knock it out of the park. Steven Zaillian did some amazing work on the first ep and it looks like he is directing most of the season.

Edit: Oh yeah.... and the girl is mesmerizing. Her early scenes with Naz set this really crazy noir vibe that doesn't go away.

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This was damn good.  Could not turn my eyes away from the TV for the whole first hour.

And as bad as it was watching Nas make one bad decision after another in the lead up to his arrest, the most agonizing part was my brain shouting ASK FOR A LAWYER ASK FOR A LAWYER ASK FOR A LAWYER at the screen while he just gave everything away to the cops for the next half hour.  Box seems like a good guy, but he was just shamelessly working that poor, naive kid to give himself up for a slam dunk conviction.  It really is bullshit that our system incentivizes cops to essentially attempt to con people out of exercising their rights.

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On 9 July 2016 at 5:42 PM, Jrag said:

So many interesting clues and theories are rumbling around in my head, but I'm going to have to wait on the rest of y'all before I get into that.

So many clues around in the first ep, I feel like I should go back and rewatch it while writing them down on a notepad.

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The second time through I got a completely different feel from the early scenes. I don't think she cared about the beach, for example, she just wanted to get the hell away from her current location. "I can't be alone tonight" takes on a whole different meaning if she was running from someone.  

She also didn't lock the damn door after letting the cat out.

Bodie covering for his friend and saying he was alone is a fake out I think. I don't think we have seen the killer just yet.

Although I did read an interesting theory somewhere about the MC rider who pulls up next to Naz as he is leaving the scene. Apparently you can tell on her ID that the dead girl also had an MC license.

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For once I was a television elitist snob and checked out both seasons of Criminal Justice from my excellent local library before watching Episode One of the HBO miniseries. and was happy to see the late Pete Postlethwaite and the lovely Ruth Negga were in the cast for the first season of the BBC production.

I'm looking forward to see what HBO will do with the materiel.  So far, I am impressed and as far as I am concerned, John Turturro has already earned his Emmy nomination.

If this turns out to be a ratings monster, I hope HBO will adopt Season 2

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Still sticking with it.  Considering that the plea deal thing could only end up going one way, the last 15 minutes of last night's ep were really good.  And now we can finally get back to the whodunit business.

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Criminal Justice, the BBC television show that this show is based on, wasn't so much concerned the whodunit as it was with mapping the bumpy ride that is the legal system whether it be controlling the narrative of events or questioning the notions of whether or not presumed innocence and jurisprudence really exist..

The Night Of may shift focus to the murder mystery to resonate with US audeinces, but the show will stick with Nas struggling to prove his innocence if this series stays close to the BBC material.

.

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4 hours ago, J.T. said:

Criminal Justice, the BBC television show that this show is based on, wasn't so much concerned the whodunit as it was with mapping the bumpy ride that is the legal system whether it be controlling the narrative of events or questioning the notions of whether or not presumed innocence and jurisprudence really exist..

The Night Of may shift focus to the murder mystery to resonate with US audeinces, but the show will stick with Nas struggling to prove his innocence if this series stays close to the BBC material.

.

I really dig the actor playing Nas, I think he's doing some solid work. 

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1 hour ago, WholeFnMachine said:

I really dig the actor playing Nas, I think he's doing some solid work. 

Riz Ahmed smashed in Four Lions. It's a great dramatic performance inside a completely absurd film. He was great in Nightcrawler as well. 

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I've seen both those movies and didn't realize that was the same guy.  That's interesting, his Nightcrawler character is a "fish out of water" type as well, but very different from Nas.  In some ways, they're polar opposites.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Man, I really hope we get some closure last week, I have my theories, but I would love a conclusive ending. And not just to the court case, I would love to know what actually happened, though I have a feeling they won't be forthcoming about that, at all. 

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On 8/22/2016 at 9:54 AM, WholeFnMachine said:

Man, I really hope we get some closure last week, I have my theories, but I would love a conclusive ending. And not just to the court case, I would love to know what actually happened, though I have a feeling they won't be forthcoming about that, at all. 

For me, it would be a bit of letdown if the Paul Sparks' character was behind the murder. It just seems contrived the stepfather would choose to murder his stepdaughter and have someone incredibly perfect to pin the murder on. On top of that, he somehow knew that Naz would take a cab without anyone's permission that night and pick Andrea up. Unless Andrea willing let someone in the apartment after sex (w/o Naz finding out), then it has to be Naz in a drug induced haze. Either that or they decided to play another game after coitus and it went horribly wrong. 

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19 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

For me, it would be a bit of letdown if the Paul Sparks' character was behind the murder. It just seems contrived the stepfather would choose to murder his stepdaughter and have someone incredibly perfect to pin the murder on. On top of that, he somehow knew that Naz would take a cab without anyone's permission that night and pick Andrea up. Unless Andrea willing let someone in the apartment after sex (w/o Naz finding out), then it has to be Naz in a drug induced haze. Either that or they decided to play another game after coitus and it went horribly wrong. 

There's always the option of Mr. Do I look like a ball of yarn to you?

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I think that the writing for the series gradually got worse and worse, but overall I'd still put it in the good category.  It is helped obviously by the first episode being one of the finest episodes of any show ever, but I think it did a lot of things well before those last couple episodes stumbled in certain areas.

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I agree.  1st episode was an all-timer.  It was still quite good for a few episodes after that, but once they had to get down the business of the plot, it got rough at the end.

All the stuff with Chandra was kinda infuriating, actually.  I'm surprised there wasn't more backlash against that.

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12 minutes ago, EVA said:

I agree.  1st episode was an all-timer.  It was still quite good for a few episodes after that, but once they had to get down the business of the plot, it got rough at the end.

All the stuff with Chandra was kinda infuriating, actually.  I'm surprised there wasn't more backlash against that.

YES! The Chandra nonsense was really inexplicable, just extremely irrational and seemingly out of character.

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If HBO goes down the toilet, Glenn Fleshler may never work again. I'm worried. 

Anyway, I think they should have at least explained why the jury was so deadlocked.

Also, even though I knew she was probably going to be a drug mule for Naz to move the plot along, it seems pretty inexplicable Chandra would allow herself to get that close with her client. Does she not know that closed circuit cameras exist?

Speaking of that, why aren't there more hot female defense attorneys willing to sneak drugs up their change purse for people? I feel this may be an untapped market.

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Someone told me that the female lawyer does something similar (kissing the client, not the whole drug mule business) in the british version of the show, so it may be something as simple as they just grabbed that part wholesale without giving it a second thought.  That would still be dumb, but it'd at least be a different, less baffling kind of dumb.

I was initially bothered by the jury being that deadlocked as the evidence was pretty solidly in the prosecution's balance, but they caught the lead investigator admitting on the stand that he tampered with the evidence... and that looked like a relatively minority-heavy jury.  In that light I can see it.

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