The only mystery in the first five episodes is who leaked the identity of the driver to the media, and the series is less interested in answering that question than in watching what happens to the characters when the news gets out. There are three, maybe four big twists, but for most of its running time, Seven Seconds is not about what happened, but why it happened - a distinction that the series never loses sight of. Here, what you see is what you get: a grim but hypnotic mini-series that plays like a hypothetical Richard Price rewrite of The Bonfire of the Vanities, with grubby New Jersey locations and no rich people. Some of the characters discover that they’re far worse than they’d imagined, while others discover an idealism they thought had vanished, or never existed.Īt the same time, though, Seven Seconds has mostly freed itself from The Killing’s addiction to generating contrived surprises by withholding key facts, sending investigators down blind alleys, and pulling the rug out from under viewers at regular intervals. If you’ve seen or read an epic urban potboiler, you’ll recognize most of the types and many of the story beats. Seven Seconds is overseen by Veena Sud, the showrunner of AMC’s The Killing, and it displays a similar inability to quit while it’s ahead, often having characters explicate psychology verbally even though anyone who’s been paying attention can already guess which demons drove certain decisions. The tactic feels morally right: Peter didn’t run over the boy because he was black, but he devalued his life because he was, and we see how instinctively racist most of the cops are, including the nonwhite ones. is determined to prosecute the hit-and-run as a hate crime as well as a negligent homicide. Their investigation leads them to a possible witness, a Catholic school girl named Nadine (Nadia Alexander), who’s addicted to heroin and turns tricks to support her habit. Harper (Clare-Hope Ashitey) partners up with recently divorced internal affairs detective Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley) to solve the crime. An assistant prosecutor and alcoholic screwup named K.J. It shatters the lives of Brenton’s churchgoing parents, Latrice (Regina King) and Isaiah (Russell Hornsby), and his uncle, Seth (Zackary Momoh), a former gangbanger who just got out of the Air Force. What ensues is a cover-up that’s as cynical as it is stupid. There’s an element of racial resentment here, too: They’re convinced that, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the whole department will take an unjustified public-relations hit if news gets out that a white cop ran over a black teen, even though Peter didn’t mean to hit him. The plain fact is that Peter is one of theirs, period, and they don’t want his life to be destroyed for what they perceive as a stroke of bad luck. The men will later argue that they thought the boy was already dead - as if that excuses their behavior. Instead of officially reporting the accident, Peter phones his supervisor on the drug task force, Mike Diangelo (David Lyons), who arrives at the scene with Jablonski’s two colleagues, Felix Osorio (Raúl Castillo) and Gary Wilcox (Patrick Murney), and instantly conspires to erase the crime. The title describes the span of time in which Jersey City police officer Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) could’ve done the right thing after running over a teenage cyclist, Brenton Butler, in a snowy park while rushing to attend the birth of his first child. The unaffected emotion in every lead performance saves the bad scenes and elevates the good ones, and the overall spirit of the thing is unimpeachable. It’s not the best or the worst of the lot, but at its most intelligent and heartfelt, it generates empathy for its characters, sadness at the culture that shaped them, and anger at the institutions that protect the worst among them. Seven Seconds, the new Netflix drama about crooked cops covering up a hit-and-run accident and investigators trying to punish them, is another TV series about how a murder affects a community.
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