The Night Of Review

It is adapted from the BBC series Criminal Justice and it is better than the original because Steven Zaillian directs it like a procedural with the volume turned down. The night itself takes an hour: a borrowed taxi, a girl, a knife, a kitchen. Then the machine starts, and the series turns out to be far more interested in intake forms, evidence bags and the tone a detective uses when he is being kind to you for a reason.

Bill Camp's Detective Box is the quiet centre of that, a man who is decent, thorough and wrong. Riz Ahmed plays Naz across a transformation the show refuses to comment on, from a boy who cannot get the word lawyer out to someone with prison ink and a supply arrangement, and he won the Emmy for it. John Turturro took over a part written for James Gandolfini and made John Stone, an ambulance chaser with eczema who argues cases in sandals, the moral centre by playing him as neither a saint nor a punchline.

Michael K. Williams is superb as the man who runs the block. The common complaint is fair: the ending deflates, the resolution arrives by technicality, and a running subplot about Stone's skin gets more screen time than anyone would design. It is still the best thing HBO has made about criminal justice since The Wire.