How The Night Of lost perspective

What began as a memorable character drama ended up a muddle of empty symbols

From Naz to Sinbad.
(Image credit: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO)

The Night Of ended with an episode nearly as polished and grim as its premiere. But the finale — titled "The Call of the Wild" — was exhausted and ashen at all the beats where the premiere was bloody and sensationalist. The Khan family dinner in the finale was as quiet and total a bloodless tragedy as you're likely to see onscreen — so much so that I wish the show had ended where it began: with them. But finales take the measure of how far we've come, and the show's focus drifted from Naz: It ended instead with John Stone, a two-bit lawyer plagued by eczema who learned to love a cat.

This was not, in my judgment, the most resonant arc in this sprawling story.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.