'The Night Of' finale: Too good for a second season. Please don't ruin it, HBO.
LOS ANGELES -- As Robeta Flack sang "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" on the hi-fi, the orange tabby cat walked across the wooden floor of Jack Stone's apartment.
And it was perfect. The end.
At a time when gracefully concluding a popular TV show seems about as easy as landing a rocket on a tiny pad in the middle of the ocean, The Night Of got this one right.
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It was complex. A little ambiguous, a little bittersweet, a lot satisfying. Everyone did the best they could with what they had. And as it turned out, the latest "limited series" from HBO was, in fact, about something.
That something came right out of Jack Stone's (John Turturro) elegant, unexpected closing argument:
What I see [pointing at Nasir "Naz" Khan, played by Riz Ahmed] is what happens when you put a kid in Rikers and say 'OK, survive that while we try you for something that you didn't do.' And that's how you survive Rikers.
Naz walked free from New York City's notorious prison not completely exonerated, but completely changed, and not for the better.
He's probably ruined for life. Drug addiction does that to too many people. But he didn't walk in as innocently as we'd initially thought, either. His arc started before that fateful night, and continues beyond the finale.
Every major character's story in The Night Of concludes, everyone has grown, and everyone has somewhere to go next.
Dammit, HBO. Please don't go there.
The Night Of, a remake of the British miniseries Criminal Justice, arrived at a great time -- when we Americans are guzzling down crime stories, real and otherwise. It had an air of auteurism because ace writer and sometime-director Steve Zaillian did most of the lifting.
Like True Detective -- the first season -- The Night Of wears the high sheen of a project that spent some time tumbling around in development. In fact, it's been kicking around since 2012, when James Gandolfini was still with us and planned to star (he takes a posthumous credit as executive producer).
And also like True Detective, The Night Of is already feeling the pressure of producing an encore. We all remember how that turned out.
TV needs to get this through its thick skull: It's OK to have success and move on. It's OK to have a one-off really work out, and then walk away. It's OK to drop the mic ... and not pick it up again. (COUGH, Stranger Things, COUGH).
The Night Of landed so elegantly -- and I have to admit, I did not see that coming -- that to touch it again is just asking for a letdown.
We don't need to see Sgt. Box chase down Raymond Halle. We get it, he's gonna nail that guy. We don't need to see Naz struggle with life back on the outside. We get it, he's gonna spiral, and it'll be fraught and ugly.
And we definitely don't need to see Jack Stone continue battling excema and allergies and a middling career as a bottomfeeding lawyer. We get it, he's gonna just have to live with his autoimmune issues, and no amount of legal notoriety will make him a top litigator. If it did, it would be boring.
There's no place for this to go that we can't see. And that's the beauty of a great ending.
Can't we just leave this one alone?
We know where this leads, HBO. And we're watching you.
Topics HBO
Josh Dickey is Mashable's Entertainment Editor, leading Mashable's TV, music, gaming and sports reporters as well as writing movie features and reviews.Josh has been the Film Editor at Variety, Entertainment Editor at The Associated Press and Managing Editor at TheWrap.com.A finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club's Best Entertainment Feature in 2015 for "Everyone is Altered: The Secret Hollywood Procedure that Fooled Us for Years," Josh received his BA in Journalism from The University of Minnesota.In between screenings, he can be found skating longboards, shredding guitar and wandering the streets of his beloved downtown Los Angeles.
