Of all the ways prestige cable dramas could redress the woeful full-frontal-nudity gender imbalance — and I’m sure we’ve all thought of several, many of them involving Kit Harington — using the penis of a dead, nude black man for a raunchy bit of prop comedy is probably last on the list. And yet! This is the road The Night Of has chosen to go down. In “The Season of the Witch,” overall the series’ most awkward combination of hardcore crime drama and gross-out humor to date, a district attorney and a medical examiner debate the origin of a knife wound in a photograph placed, for no apparent reason other than laughs, next to the exposed genitalia of a corpse in the middle of getting the fluids from its eyeballs and bladder drained. Shit, I’ve already complained about the overabundance of sexualized shots of the unclothed body of the female murder victim at the heart of the story; “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” is not the remedy I had in mind.
And hey, this isn’t even the only nude, brutalized black male body on display this week! Earlier in the episode, Naz is offered the opportunity of revenge against the man who burned him last week by his benefactor Freddy, who has the assailant naked, prostrate, and trapped in the showers. Naz gets a half-hearted kick or two in on his tormenter and is ready to walk away — until the man, unwisely given his circumstances at the time, taunts the kid as a “faggot.” Since there’s nothing more menacing than having your sexuality threatened by a black man, Naz goes berserk, pounding the guy into a bloody pulp until Freddy’s goons have to pull him off to keep him from committing “another” murder. Later, Freddy expresses admiration for the “secrets and rage” that motivate his new apprentice; this conversation, at least, does not take place in front of a dead or injured person’s penis for no apparent reason, so thank heaven for small favors.
I had real problems with last Sunday’s The Night Of, which I reviewed for Decider.
Tags: decider, reviews, the night of, TV, TV reviews