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?
