HBO’s 8-Part Masterpiece Perfected the Slow-Burn Crime Thriller Better Than ‘True Detective’

Published Jul 22, 2026, 11:09 PM EDT

Liam Gaughan is a film and TV writer at Collider. He has been writing film reviews and news coverage for ten years. Between relentlessly adding new titles to his watchlist and attending as many screenings as he can, Liam is always watching new movies and television shows.

In addition to reviewing, writing, and commentating on both new and old releases, Liam has interviewed talent such as Mark Wahlberg, Jesse Plemons, Sam Mendes, Billy Eichner, Dylan O’Brien, Luke Wilson, and B.J. Novak. Liam aims to get his spec scripts produced and currently writes short films and stage plays. He lives in Allentown, PA.

HBO has been light-years ahead of its competitors in the prestige television landscape. Acclaimed HBO limited series like ***Band of Brothers ***and ***The Pacific proved the network could bring cinematic scope to television. The 2016 legal series The Night Of ***fulfills these requirements, creating an eight-episode master class in tension. With its thorough examination of the legal process, **The Night Of also proved to be a groundbreaking deconstruction of the systematic racial and ethical biases within the American justice system.

*The Night Of *follows Pakistani-American college student Naz Khan (Riz Ahmed) during a romantic evening he shares with a woman named Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black-D’Elia) after they meet at a party. Naz’s night is filled with bad decisions; he steals his father’s (Payman Maadi) taxi cab in order to attend the party, abuses drugs that cloud his memories, and gets arrested shortly thereafter after failing to comply with traffic laws. Although none of Naz’s activities are depicted as being malicious, the series shows how easily actions can be misinterpreted. Naz wakes up to find that Andrea has been stabbed to death. In retrospect, he realizes that all of his actions on the night that she was killed make him look overly suspicious. It’s the rare murder mystery story that is told exclusively through the perspective of the major suspect.

Your answers point to the iconic universe your values, your instincts, and your particular way of seeing the world were built for. This is where you would find your people — and your purpose.

You believe in the cause — in the idea that freedom is worth fighting for even when the odds are impossible and the empire is vast.

You understand, in the deepest part of yourself, that the journey matters as much as the destination — and that the world’s beauty is worth protecting even at great cost.

You believe that love, loyalty, and doing what’s right are not naive sentiments — they are the most powerful forces in any world, magical or otherwise.

You see the world clearly — its power structures, its hypocrisies, its brutal arithmetic — and you are not paralysed by that clarity. You use it.

You believe the future is worth building — that curiosity, cooperation, and the expansion of understanding are not just ideals but the most practical path forward for any civilisation.

The brilliance of the inciting incident in *The Night Of *is that showrunner **Steven Zaillian **doesn’t treat anything within Naz’s routine as abnormal. This creates more suspense, **as the consequences of Naz’s irresponsible behavior are only evident to the audience. **The intensity continues to escalate because Naz realizes too late that he has cast doubt upon his own innocence. This gives him a burden of guilt that he carries with him for the rest of the series, as Naz is forced to reflect upon how different things could have been if he had never met Andrea in the first place. As Naz, Ahmed balances these feelings of guilt and regret in one of his greatest performances.

Although there are hints of romance within their brief interactions, Naz knows very little about Andrea before she is killed. This was an important decision, as the impersonal nature of the crime makes it more shocking. Naz doesn’t have the capacity to mourn Andrea’s death because he barely knows her, and does not have any hints as to why she was killed. While Andrea’s shocking death is unquestionably a tragic one, it’s really just an inciting incident that sparks the show’s deconstruction of the legal process. The specificity with which Zallian examines the legal procedures that Naz experiences evokes comparisons to the great courtroom drama films of the 1990s.

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