The Night Of Finale Recap: Feeling An Itch of Disappointment
The Night Of is over. The show accomplished everything it set out to. It clearly wanted to make a point about what being accused of a crime and can do to a person, and the far-reaching ripple effects that has. Totally fair. Point made. It set out to paint a picture of everything wrong with the criminal justice system on an institutional level. Check. Gritty and realistic character development? Done. Hey we even got a lead on the person who almost certainly murdered Andrea. Look at them, I’m proud of them.
So the biggest question I have now, is that even with most of the big questions at least partially answered and the show now coming to a close, why do I feel so disappointed and unsatisfied with how The Night Of ended?
The finale was a microcosm of how I’ve felt about the entire series of The Night Of. I feel like it should have been either an hour longer or an hour shorter, and I can’t decide which. Obviously we are past the point of thinking of the The Night Of as a murder mystery, which it hasn’t been since its first (and best) episode. But for some random dots to be connected by Box for it to be a coked out hooker-beater who looks like one of Donald Trump’s kids felt rushed and forced. The Shandra subplot came out of nowhere. Explaining it with “Well it shows how many lives a case can touch” makes no sense. She was his lawyer. Of course she’ll be affected by his case. That point was already proven with what he saw from his parents.
I won’t go on and on and pick apart every little thing I didn’t like, that comes off as pretentious and annoying and that I know how to write a story better than HBO writers, which I don’t. But it was just frustrating and disappointing that so many of the problems throughout the series (not deciding what the identity or even genre of the show would be, throwing in random subplots, disproportionate time allotment to largely insignificant details while overlooking important ones) weren’t fixed or addressed in the finale. They were amplified. I’ve said the past one and a half months or so that The Night Of was a scattered and sprawling show, but a great finale could tie it all together in a bow and pay the audience for the time investment we’ve given them. For the show to live up to the hype that critics gave it, and that we came to expect after the first two excellent episodes, the finale had to be one of the better endings to a season of TV in the past few years. It didn’t just have to land, it had to stick it and do a backflip. And it didn’t. To be completely honest with you, I don’t think it even really came close.
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So what are we left to think of The Night Of? It was entertaining. It was an enjoyable way to spend an hour every Sunday, and made for some interesting conversation with other people who watch the show. It made a few interesting points about the criminal justice system that I hadn’t thought about before. It was pretty good. And that’s all I feel about The Night Of. It was a fairly good show that I enjoyed as I watched and am probably going to forget about in a couple of weeks. I guess there are worse things to be than that. Just with where my expectation level was after the start and all the hype the show got, I can’t help but feel a distinct sense of disappointment.
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