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“What do you mean you haven’t seen The Night Of?”
If we had a penny for every time that above sentence has been uttered in JOE in the last few weeks we’d have… many, many pennies.
We love our TV and The Night Of is about as good as it gets.
It’s a clever, tense exploration of innocence and America told through the story of Naz (Riz Ahmed), a young man accused of murder.
It comes from HBO and is co-written by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Steve Zallian (Schindler’s List) and Richard Price (The Wire) so the prestige really couldn’t be higher. As a result, The Night Of is a gripping, brilliantly told story that’s destined to win every award under the sun.
Honestly, there are a million reasons to watch the show, but we’ve whittled it down to just a few…
Riz Ahmed
The talented and charismatic lead of The Night Of has been on the brink of stardom for some time.
You may first remember the English rapper-turned-actor appeared in Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set, a comedy-drama about zombies invading the Big Brother house.
Ahmed then made an impression on international audiences with his lead role as Omar, the hapless leader of a shambolic jihadist group in Chris Morris’s pitch black comedy Four Lions.
Clip via StudiocanalUK
A steady string of solid supporting roles in high profile films soon followed. He played the terrified assistant of Jake Gyllenhaal’s psychotic cameraman in Nightcrawler and recently made life difficult for Matt Damon’s amnesiac super spy in Jason Bourne.
He’ll next be seen in a little independent film called Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Have a look at the clip below of Riz talking about the weirdness of post-Brexit Britain with Stephen Colbert.
True crime parallels
The show is about a miscarriage of justice in action, a theme familiar to anyone whose gorged on Netflix’s Making A Murderer or the podcast Serial.
If you’re familiar with either then you’ve probably spent hours discussing the relative guilt or innocence of Serial’s protagonist Adnan Syed or Making A Murderer’s Steven Avery.
Both men are currently awaiting a retrial, but Avery’s nephew Brendan – who was convicted alongside his uncle of a gruesome murder – was recently released from prison when a judge decided that his confession was coerced.
He wasn’t the only high-profile victim of the American judicial system to be released recently; the West Memphis 3 were finally freed after decades in jail.
The Innocence Project – a foundation dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners – has had a reported surge in donations since public interest in their work has increased.
The American judicial system
Deep down, everyone would like to believe that justice prevails in the courtroom. Unfortunately we’ve seen time and time again that this is not the case, particularly in America.
The Night Of touches on some of the major inconsistencies in the American judicial system. 
The desire to win trumps any idea surrounding justice. If you have money (in the case of The Jinx’s Robert Durst) then you can buy your freedom. If you can’t afford your own solicitor, you enter a lottery for a public defender who is more than likely not going to be any good.
There are unequal incarceration rates depending on your ethnicity and then there’s the prospect of living in jail which sounds, at best, hellish.
Racial profiling
The land of the free does seem like it’s been especially divided recently.
With Trump attempting to bray his way into the White House and Clinton’s chilly demeanor, the future doesn’t seem especially bright.
The Night Of feels very timely with the fractious relationship between police and non-white citizens in the states.
Like Serial’s Adnan, The Night Of’s Naz is an American citizen of Muslim faith thrown into jail with the presumption of guilt for a crime that’s completely out of character.
This racial profiling isn’t a new phenomenon.
Pre-Good Friday agreement, the Irish were the nationality to be suspicious of abroad. Post 9/11, this shifted to those of Muslim descent.
On 5 October, 1974, bombs planted by the IRA in two pubs in Guildford killed 4 and injured more than 50 people. Belfast-native Gerry Conlon and his friends were arrested for the crime.
False confessions were coerced after days of torture by the metropolitan police. The Guildford Four were sent to jail, but after years of appeals they were finally freed. These harrowing events are chronicled in the excellent film In The Name Of The Father starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
The tale of Conlon’s mistreatment echoes to this day and is sadly repeated the world over, from Russia to Guantánamo Bay. It serves as a sobering reminder of the adage by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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