When Naz Khan, the 23-year-old student son of a Pakistani American cab driver, is found leaving a crime scene containing the corpse – with 22 stab wounds – of a young woman with whom he spent a wild night, the case seems unlikely to detain a New York jury for long. In a typically arresting line, a cop summarises the evidence excitedly: “Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll – and he’s a Muslim!”  Yet this apparently simple “solve” remains, across the whole of this HBO eight-parter, ambiguous to the end – and possibly even beyond it. “The truth can go to hell!” is the warning to Naz from John Stone, the bottom-feeder lawyer who is the only defence the Khan family can afford.  Based on a 2008 BBC1 series called Criminal Justice – but completely relocating the storyline both geographically and tonally – The Night Of was written by novelist Richard Price and directed by Stephen Zaillian.  It feels like a 21st-century relative of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, with which it shares a documentary realism about a descent through the US legal system: the physical horrors of imprisonment on Rikers Island, the banter between judges and attorneys. But, whereas Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy was a white American held responsible for the death of a non-white, Price flips the backgrounds of victim and suspect, leaving the racial politics very different indeed. The script is filled with dog-whistle comments such as the state prosecutor’s Isis-innuendo at a bail hearing to native New Yorker Naz’s “roots in Pakistan”.  Perhaps influenced by prose fiction, Price shifts the power and perspective within scenes to a degree that is unusual on screen: some conversations between Stone and the Khan parents show us how he sees them, while others offer the reverse. The writing also masterfully builds uncertainty from the fact that the protagonist either can’t (or claims he can’t) remember what happened that night.  The characters are spiky and complex, having likable and dislikable qualities but always a zone of unknowability, in the way that real people do. As Stone – a role that James Gandolfini was prevented from taking by death, and Robert De Niro by scheduling conflicts – John Turturro makes it impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. Off-putting personal habits, including picking at his psoriatic scabs with a stick, mask a basic human decency, but one that might provocatively include gaming the system to free a killer. Riz Ahmed, the latest non-white British actor to have to go abroad to find the best work, harrowingly portrays the shock and shame of a young man who, regardless of whether or not he is guilty, is an innocent at law.  Strikingly, The Night Of has been nominated in the best limited series category of the Golden Globes alongside two other shows that examine the reliability of the legal system: FX’s The People v OJ Simpson and ABC’s American Crime. In a period when US headlines are regularly made by contentious police actions involving alleged racial prejudice, it’s unsurprising that the courts should be in the dock. But what is also intriguing about these programmes is that it is only the mildest of spoilers to say that – in this trio of cases – OJ Simpson’s is the only one in which it is absolutely clear at the end who was guilty.  In some cases, open endings are a cynical attempt to seed a second season but, with The Night Of, any loose ends are part of its mature reflection of a society and a system in which facts have become relative – not least to a suspect.
In HBO’s riveting plunge into the murky depths of the US justice system, Riz Ahmed and John Turturro saw truth twisted and the sins of society go unpunished