This summer HBO released an eight-part miniseries starring John Tuturro and Riz Ahmed called The Night Of. The frame work of this series starts out as a murder mystery. The main character, Nazir Khan, a Muslim college student living in a Queens suburb gets tangled into one of the most complex murder mysteries of a life time.
In the first episode we meet Nazir as any ordinary college student. One night he wants to go to a party with his friends. He steals his Dad’s New York City cab and drives into Manhattan. Never being a cabby himself he doesn’t know how to turn off the on duty light. A women named Andrea gets into his cab. Several hours later after drugs and sex Nazir wakes up in her kitchen. He goes upstairs to say goodbye, but instead finds Andrea dead and soaked in her own blood. Stabbed as many times as her age. 22.
Nazir quickly runs out of her apartment in a panic and state of hysteria. He drives away in the cab, gets pulled over for making a turn without using a proper signal. He ends up in a police station where a detective finds a blood covered knife, presumably a murder weapon at the time.
What unfolds in the next 7 episodes is not just a trial, not a path to figure out if Nazir is guilty or innocent, but something much more. The Night Of shows us how the impacts of our criminal justice system can change someone as innocent and vulnerable as Nazir. He walks into Rikers Island prison in episode 3 with a cloak of innocence and by the finale it is gone.
His entire family have their lives changed forever by this trial. The media throughout the trial depicts him as a Pakistani murderer. As a result, his parents lose their jobs and are forced to work minimum wage jobs to support his younger brother while Nazir is sitting in Rikers Island. Nazir finds protection from inmates in prison by using hard drugs and doing illegal favors for other inmates. He reaches a certain point that it is not important whether he gets freed or found guilty. Nazir is already broken down, and rebuilt as an entirely different person on Rikers Island.
The Night Of shows its audience what it takes for someone like Nazir to survive in prison and our criminal justice system. Who you see in episode 1 is an entirely different person than in episode 8. The murder itself becomes less and less important, rather the aftermath and the events throughout the trial is what makes this mini series so captivating for it's audience.
In the finale, John Tuturro says "95% of my clients I can see their guilt. I tell them to take a plea. When I saw Nazir in a holding cell I didn't see what I see in my other clients and I still don't all this time. What I see is what happens when you put a kid in Rikers and say, see… Now survive that while we try you for a crime you didn't do."
