I was really looking forward to the new TNT series I Am the Night. The series, about the infamous Black Dahlia murder from the perspective of the 1960s, looked to be in the vein of a James Ellroy novel like L.A. Confidential. Unfortunately, I Am the Night isn’t even James Ellroy-ish and after the first episode I’m not quite sold on the series yet.
In the show, Chris Pine stars as Jay Singletary, a disgraced newspaper reporter who because of a story he wrote in the past was blackballed and now is forced to take pictures of philandering celebrities and murdered corpses in morgues in order to make ends meet. India Eisley is Pat, a biracial teenager living with her African American mother in a segregated Nevada town who learns that she’s actually white and adopted when she stumbles across her birth certificate. As Pat contacts her grandfather in Los Angeles and then decides to travel there to meet him, she discovers that things might not be copacetic when she tries contacting him but is told by the woman who answers the phone to stay away since her grandpa is a very dangerous man.
And that was pretty much it.
I got the feeling that I Am the Night is being treated more as a show people are supposed to binge watch rather than a traditional cable drama. Bingeable shows can have whole episodes where not too much story happens other than we learn about the characters since there’s always another episode ready to go in the queue next. Network shows with their weeklong delay between episodes do not. I almost felt like that first episode of I Am the Night could probably be removed entirely from the series with whatever backstory needed for the characters sprinkled throughout the series. Isn’t it more interesting to discover a character you thought you knew after a few episodes is completely different when something unique about them is revealed at some point later in the season? Isn’t that better than stuffing the first episode full of backstory for characters we haven’t had time to care about yet?
Now the six episode mini-series I Am the Night might morph into something really interesting and good, I just wonder how many episodes it’s going to take in order to get there?
