The Night Of

HBO's 2016 limited series from Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, adapted from the BBC's "Criminal Justice." Riz Ahmed plays Naz, a shy Pakistani-American college kid in Queens who borrows his dad's cab without permission to sneak out to a party. A woman gets in. The night goes sideways in ways he isn't equipped to handle, and by morning he's in a precinct in Manhattan being questioned by a homicide detective (Bill Camp) who's about six moves ahead of him. John Turturro plays John Stone, a low-rent ambulance-chaser lawyer with a chronic eczema problem, who wanders into the wrong precinct at the right time. Michael Kenneth Williams turns up at Rikers. Amara Karan and Jeannie Berlin round out the legal side. Eight episodes.

Bill Camp. If you've never paid attention to him, this is the performance that fixes that. His Detective Box is patient, courteous, quietly devastating, and the interrogation-room material in the first hour is a masterclass in how procedural work should be shot and played. Turturro's Stone is the other engine, a shabby, itchy, deeply human lawyer who reads cases off subway ads. Zaillian directs the majority of the run himself and gives it a grimy, unhurried, almost European texture. Price's dialogue is the good stuff, salty and specific, cops and lawyers who sound like they've been doing this for twenty years. Riz Ahmed is startlingly good as a kid who keeps making the second-worst decision available. The show cares about small things: how a bail hearing works, how evidence gets logged, what the inside of central booking smells like.

It's slow. Not artfully slow in a way everyone will forgive, actually slow, with long stretches devoted to Stone's foot cream regimen and cat custody arrangements. The middle episodes wander. A couple of subplots stall out. The show is more interested in the machinery of the system than in giving you the tight cause-and-effect satisfactions of a good whodunit, and if you came for the whodunit you'll feel that. Some of the Rikers material leans on prison-movie shorthand.

If you liked "Zodiac," the first season of "True Detective," or "Better Call Saul" for the paperwork parts, this is aimed straight at you. Fans of "Line of Duty" and old-school Sidney Lumet courtroom stuff, same. If you need a body every episode and a big twist every third, or you thought "Mare of Easttown" dragged, this'll test you. Reddit-brain viewers who want the case solved in a spreadsheet will be annoyed by an ending that isn't built for them.

WORTH IT because the craft is real. Zaillian and Price aren't reaching for a message; they're reaching for a mood and a system, and they render both with the kind of attention most prestige television has stopped paying. The show has opinions about the criminal justice apparatus, obviously, but it earns them through Camp's tired eyes and Turturro's scratched shins, not through speeches. Nobody stops the plot to explain the theme. Characters don't lecture, they behave, and their behavior is the argument. Pacing keeps it out of GREAT TV, and the middle sags. But performance, direction, and dialogue are all working at a level that clears the bar comfortably. Worth the eight hours.