THE NIGHT OF is a crime story. The new HBO eight part limited series delves into the intricacies of a complex New York City murder case with cultural and political overtones. The story examines the police investigation, the legal proceedings, the criminal justice system and Rikers Island, where the accused await trial.
John Turturro stars as an embattled defence attorney, while Riz Ahmed is his young Pakistani-American client who is accused of brutally murdered a young woman on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Creator Steven Zaillian says “It’s a crime story, a police story, a legal story, a corrections story. You make a story about all that, tell it honestly, and it will naturally be a social story. But none of that is going to be interesting if you don’t tell it with characters who are interesting. Every character in this has their own life and story and concerns and reasons for why they do what they do. No one is written to get you to empathize with them, or to represent something, or to be a hero or a villain. They are simply meant to be real. In my experience, no one ever really says what they mean, so my characters don’t either. What they do is react to and interact with the situations facing them in a natural, unsentimental way, and in doing that, reveal themselves, and hopefully some kind of understanding comes of it.”
THE NIGHT OF premieres on Sunday, July 10 at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Canada.
