This new HBO series brings Scandinavian crime-noir to the U.S. to explore dysfunction in the criminal justice system and undermine existing cinematic representations of it.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This scene, above, in the seventh episode of the series shows John Turturro in a copy shop printing evidence boards that will be used at trial. The kid working there asks him: 'Is this for Law and Order? We do a lot of props[referring evidence to be presented at trial] like this for them'. To which Turturro replies sarcastically, 'yeah, Law and Order...'. Later in the scene, the kid says to him, apparently missing the sarcasm of Turturro's reply completely: 'I don't know, production assistants are usually younger than you'. This scene perfectly encapsulates what is interesting about the series: on the one hand, it is a detailed crime and legal procedural completely in the spirit of Scandinavian crime-noir (complete with intro-sequence clearly inspired by such Danish TV shows as The Legacy¹, The Bridge² or Swedish series Beck³) that exposes, in the way these shows typically do, the (total) dysfunction of the American criminal justice system in a documentary-style way: painfully slowly and methodically detailed. On the other hand, the series slyly exposes, without being pedantic about it, the role American cultural representations of the criminal justice system and policing have had in producing this dysfunction, through shows such as Law and Order or Cops. In fact, more than not being pedantic, the series makes its points so subtly, so casually that, in the process, one becomes aware of the completely incidental—even coincidental—way in which this system and the culture that supports it is able to, through such banality, cause so much harm.

So, the series is about the increasingly dysfunctional criminal justice system in the U.S.: one which incarcerates the highest percentage of the world's prisoners, that incarcerates people for life based on mandatory sentencing and repeat-offender guidelines setup in the '80s and '90s for such petty things as shoplifting or possession of a small amount of marijuana, where prosecutors bring charges for their own political reasons without any kind of proportionality to the crime⁴, where police are for the most part immune from criminal prosecution for the hundreds of deaths that they are responsible for every year⁵, and where the exorbitant costs of a legal defense prevents many from ever receiving anything remotely resembling a fair trial. In this sense, the series is in the same vein as the recent HBO series The Jinx⁶, the Netflix series Making a Murderer⁷, or the NPR radio broadcast and internet podcast Serial(on which the series draws most directly)⁸. And as with those series, this one also highlights many aspects of this dysfunction; but rather than being a documentary, it takes a different, fictionalized approach that clearly imports many elements of the by now famous Scandinavian crime-noir, books and films popularized recently in the U.S. as a result of the Girl With A Dragon Tattoo series. As with them, this one is shot in low light, processed into a cool, shining, dark aesthetic featuring a good-guy, heart-of-gold every-man lawyer/private investigator who suffers, as with most such lead characters in Swedish and Danish series, from some health and personality afflictions⁹, but who, unlike in these Scandinavian series where the police generally face the problem of following law and procedure fairly, is faced instead with all of the flaws and dysfunctions of his American cultural context¹⁰. In this sense, the series is an import, but also a significant mutation of the genre.

More interesting, perhaps, are the ways in which the series accomplishes its purpose of exposing the criminal justice system's dysfunction. The series' most effective, if not somewhat irritating method, is its pacing. Representations of the criminal justice system on TV almost always seem so efficient: there is a crime, an arrest, a charge, then a trial and a conviction. Simple. These shows move aggressively and smoothly from one point to the next, fueled by the work of diligently investigating the crime and trying the case. In contrast to this, The Night Of moves very slowly. When we are wanting to see the next revelation in the case, we are stuck watching some situation with Turturro's feet or with one of his allergies to cats or a situation in his sex-life; or with off-duty conversations of the police chief; or of the politics and life inside the prison and the struggle to survive there. This pacing and interpolation of the main crime procedural with these plot-lines has the effect of producing an actual experience of the criminal justice system that can only operate in just this way: as something that takes place along-side the broader continuity of life, within the context of all of the lives who work within the system and those lives subject to its machinations. Policing and lawyering are, after all, just jobs for most people. By pacing itself so slowly, by making us wait for new revelations in the case, forcing us to experience one interpolated plot-line after another, the series raises awareness of the kind of torture it inflicts on those subject to it and to see the criminal justice system, not only as a system for administering justice, but as a system of disruption to the normal flow of life. Our waiting as an audience is precisely what allows us to understand the twists and turns in the plot and that renders otherwise seemingly banal decisions as significant¹¹, as we suffer the pain of having closure withheld yet again, for another episode.

Connected to the pacing of the show, is the sense one gets while watching it that the system really does operate on a kind of autopilot: each person (the police investigator, the lawyers, the judge, the prison guards) has their own job to do and their own life to live. Even the suspects we encounter have their own lives. From this vantage point we can see, on the one hand, the immense difficulty involved in penetrating the superficial appearance of normality of others' lives to try to uncover deeper, concealed motivations and history that are involved with investigating a crime and, on the other hand, we see what a miracle it is for such a system of structured lives to make even the smallest deviation from its established course in order to conform to the specificity of each situation. People have pride issues, issues about wanting to appear in control, to be simply right, to do their job, to appear to do their job, not implicate themselves in a crime, appear upstanding...on top of that, people have their own problems in life, their own conflicts, dramas and idiosyncrasies. So, when we see the violence wrought by this system and the speed at which it operates, it appears to us as both an injustice and as something purely ordinary. So, as the series raises deeper issues or morality we can also come to see them not purely as rational moral decisions, but more broadly as a morality embedded within the innocuous eb and flow of life--how easy it is for moral motivations to get lost in the procedure and the time it takes to unfold them to some kind of 'justice' and the effort required to overcome the in-built momentum of the system's movement. This tactic makes doing the right thing appear that much more difficult at the same time that it also makes not doing it appear that much more indefensible and urgent: for, how, seriously, can the rest of a person's natural born life be determined by someone's itchy feet, by a judge's desire to simply keep his court-room moving and operating at peak 'efficiency', or by the legacy of an immanent retirement?

Finally, by deliberately failing to obey the conventions of the American crime procedural, the series also raises awareness of the disconnect between the actual criminal justice system and the representations of it given to us most of the time. American culture is pervaded with crime procedurals of all kinds. Flipping from one channel to another, one can find 'bad guys' fleeing from police, police kicking down the doors to confront an abusive husband or to find a crack-dealer in mid-transaction; or we can see the incredible precision and ferocious tenacity of some CSI detective or forensic pathologist who can't sleep or let even the most minute detail escape them and who uses incredibly sophisticated, hi-tech devices to isolate definitive nano-particle traces as evidence. And these shows have an effect: they create the impression that whatever person the police chase 'must have done something' to attract the police's attention, since the show always ends-up with the officer finding something in the end (despite that he got it illegally through a violation of the 'suspects' civil rights); or the accused only has to sit in a jail cell (or stay on the run) long enough for forensics investigators to locate the necessary evidence to locate and charge him categorically (or exonerate him). One becomes accustomed to the certain fulfillment of suspicion with solid evidence to support it, or that the only way suspicion can be dispelled is through the finding of 'hard evidence'. Together these shows turn the actual criminal justice system into a kind of circus within which those responsible for its application attempt to fulfill the roles and expectations carved-out for them on television, thereby missing entirely the fact that real life is much more complex, unpredictable and ambiguous than any of these shows portrays.

Which is why The Night Of is so important in its content as well as its execution: it brings some of the even-handed sanity and suffocating ordinariness of Scandinavian culture and its representations in crime-noir cinema to an American culture so desperately in need of it. Scandinavian dramas are always sexy, classy, have an unmistakable cool aesthetic that elevates the everyday to something more. Rather than continually attempting to make the ordinary unreal by obliterating its time-line and temporality to make it fast-paced, action-packed, and always in perfect conformity with some kind of fantastical pseudo-science, The Night Of holds out hope that American culture can begin to be defined more by the potential contained within the ordinary, slow-paced atomization and fragmentation of family and social life, a failing economy, crumbling infrastructure, over-crowded jails, a corrupt politics and legal system, kangaroo courts, and mountains of unjustly convicted children that, at the moment, are for the most part cinematically invisible. In this way, it could be that through a series like this, the ordinary becomes cool again, and being that regular guy, gritting his teeth to bear the burden of a miserable, tortured existence gets a new cinematic image against which it can begin to model itself, thereby giving voice and visibility to a vast expanse of ordinary-life waiting around America to get back to being real again. And while, the series has not yet concluded, and we don't know how it will turn out, we can only hope for the most epic counter-climatic conclusion possible, one that drains the entirety of American cultural expectation to 'get the bad guy' dry and leaves us wondering why we wasted our time and energy for 9-episodes waiting to see that. An emptiness with resonance.

Footnotes