Brow Beat

The Night Of Is More Than a Crime Thriller. It’s Also a Great Prison Drama.

Naz.

HBO

In the Night Of episode “The Art of War,” Naz (Riz Ahmed) settles into life at Rikers Island, the notorious New York prison. In the course of a single episode, he gains and loses a high-powered pro bono attorney, Alison (Glenne Headly), who’s only interested in taking his case if he’s willing to plead guilty, and strikes out on bail again, which means he’s stuck in prison at least until his case goes to trial. It’s time for him to stop thinking about getting out and focus on staying alive.

The Night Of’s Rikers is a dangerous place, as it is in real life: In 2013, Mother Jones named it one of the 10 worst prisons in the U.S., citing its “inmate violence, staff brutality, rape, abuse of adolescents and the mentally ill, and one of the nation’s highest rates of solitary confinement.” (Its Yelp reviews are pretty lousy, too.) Unlike other prison shows, like Oz or Orange Is the New Black, The Night Of focuses almost exclusively on the relationships between the inmates; the guards are vague, faceless presences, neither protectors nor tormentors. And though the threat of sexual violence looms (it doesn’t require much imagination to understand why Naz is warned to wear rubber-soled shoes in the shower), it’s also the rare prison show where no one, at least as of the sixth episode, “Samson and Delilah,” gets raped in jail.* It’s a portrayal of prison as an environment that’s brutal but stops short of being cartoonishly hellish: As with The Night Of’s portrayal of the courts, prison is a system that can be learned and navigated, as long as you divorce yourself from the idea that what happens inside it has anything to do with what’s fair.

Having already gone through one prison mentor, Naz picks up another in Calvin (Ashley Thomas), whose advice shows how narrow is the line that Naz must walk: “What you gotta do now is start walking like a man who’s not afraid to look a man in the eye,” Calvin tells Naz, “only don’t you ever look him in the eye, cause you’ll regret that.”

It’s no less confusing in court. “I need you to trust me like you’ve never trusted anybody in your life,” Alison tells him, but she’s demanding his trust rather than earning it, which is why he turns to her associate, Chandra (Amara Karan) for a second opinion. And while Alison adamantly believes that Naz should plead guilty, Chandra thinks he should fight the charges. In fiction, it’s almost always a good idea to fight if you’re not guilty—although we don’t know for sure that Naz didn’t commit the murder of which he’s accused—but given the show’s overall pessimism about the legal system, it’s entirely possible that by the last episode, Naz will wish he’d copped that plea.

Back at Rikers, Naz’s loyalties are shifting: He ignores Calvin’s advice to reject the gift of a blue prison jumpsuit from Freddy (Michael K. Williams)—orange would have marked him as a violent felon in front of the judge—and, after the trial, goes to see the prison’s de facto crime boss. Freddy has a wall full of newspaper clippings detailing his once-promising boxing career and his fall from grace, but what he’s proudest of, he explains, is his high school diploma—earned in school, he points out, not a GED certificate. As a middle-class college student, Freddy explains, Naz is “like a care package for my brain,” although the chances he’s only helping Naz because he wants someone to talk to are not especially robust.

Figuring that books are the way to Naz’s heart, Freddy offers him a copy of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, which—along with the prison-library favorite that gives “The Art of War” its title—is meant to serve as a guide for surviving on the inside. But Naz says he’s already read the book and rejects the copy, along with the offer of friendship—the second time he’s turned Freddy down. The last time Naz rejected Freddy’s overture, his bed was mysteriously set on fire. But this time, when he returns to his bunk, Naz finds a copy of Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight, which, according to Freddy, is the only book as popular inside Rikers as The Art of War, “for obvious reasons.” For those who aren’t up on their 1980s airport novels, The Other Side of Midnight was notorious for its graphic sex scenes, and its inclusion here serves as a reminder that surviving prison isn’t just a matter of keeping your body alive. When he advises Naz to take the plea deal, his former lawyer John Stone (John Turturro) tells him that getting out of prison in 12 years means he still has a chance to be human—any longer, and the old Naz will be gone for good. Steamy love scenes from trashy novels might not be the best way to nourish Naz’s soul, but it’s better than nothing, and with the wheels of justice turning slowly, he has to grab onto anything he can.

*Correction, Aug. 10, 2016: This post originally misstated that “Samson and Delilah” is the fifth episode of The Night Of. It’s the sixth.