http://www.thenerdelement.com/2019/01/25/tnts-i-am-the-night/

*TNT provided the entire series for
review. This review contains mild spoilers for the overall story.

TNT’s
new limited series, I Am The Night,
oscillates between genuine noir thrills and potboiler excess, with touches of
the Gothic thrown in for good measure. It’s an intriguing premise, but unfortunately,
it doesn’t come together as a cohesive whole.

As
one of the titles on each episode states, the story is “Inspired by the life of
Fauna Hodel,” a careful turn of phrase. Rather than dramatize Fauna’s sordid
and sorrowful true story, writer/creator Sam Sheridan, working with producers
Patty Jenkins (who directs the first two episodes) and Chris Pine (who stars as
Jay Singletary, a disgraced reporter suffering PTSD from his time in the Korean
War), uses it as a springboard to explore a famous unsolved murder.

Themes
of family secrets, identity, racism, and police corruption hang in the
atmosphere, each worthy of its own exploration, yet each obliterated by the
story’s focus, not on Fauna’s identity crisis, but the possibility that her maternal
grandfather, George Hodel (played by a perfectly creepy Jefferson Mays), is the
Black Dahlia killer.

When
we first meet Fauna (a luminous India Eisley), she’s growing up impoverished in
Sparks, Nevada, a mixed-race teenager whose alcoholic mother, Jimmie Lee
(Golden Brooks) is struggling to raise her. Jimmie Lee also struggles with
everything she gave up, including a promising singing career, to raise Fauna,
who is not her own child. Fauna’s discovery that she is adopted sends her on an
odyssey to Los Angeles to meet her grandfather and find her biological mother.
It’s there that she uncovers more family secrets, one of which could possibly
get her killed.

Meanwhile,
Pine’s Singletary, an invented character helping propel the narrative outside
Fauna’s search, is hell-bent on proving Hodel murdered Elizabeth Short (the
infamous “Black Dahlia”) and possibly other women in gruesome fashion. Having
been humiliated years earlier while covering Hodel’s trial for abuse of his
daughter, Tamar (Jamie Anne Allman), Singletary is reduced to photographing
starlets in compromising positions and writing other sleazy stories.
Eventually, while covering a murder in which another woman was cut into pieces,
he latches on to the theory that Hodel is the Black Dahlia murderer, which
eventually sets him on a path that intersects with Fauna’s.

All
of this would make for a corking thriller if it meshed together, but it does
not. The first two episodes set a mannered, formal noir tone, a bit distancing
but also well-done. By the third episode, though, the series becomes
increasingly pulpy, veering into Gothic territory in later eps and culminating
in a reach for profundity that ultimately rings hollow.

It’s
not for lack of talent behind the camera, as each director (Jenkins, Victoria
Mahoney, and Carl Franklin each directed two) bring a steady hand to the
material. Sheridan wrote five of the six episodes as well. It seems, though
that each director’s approach was very different, resulting in a tone that is
not consistent.

The
actors are all uniformly good, from Eisley’s determined and pre-possessed
Fauna, to Pine’s violence-prone Singletary. Connie Nielsen also turns in a
wicked performance as Corinna, one of Hodel’s ex-wives and a canny artist in
her own right.

Mostly,
though, I was bothered by what I saw as unnecessary inventions and diversions
in bringing Fauna’s story to life. Growing up thinking you are a poor,
mixed-race child and finding out your birth family is rich is no picnic, but
everything else she learns about the Hodels (which I won’t reveal because it’s
better to see it in the show, though you can find online if you like) is
fascinating enough that focusing even part of the story on a person who didn’t
exist seems a waste (again, not Pine’s fault—he’s great in the role). Also, while
I can see the parallels they’re trying to draw between Pine’s war-inflicted
psychic wounds leading to violence and Hodel’s own childhood traumas and
penchant for murder, they never worked for me. Fauna herself was involved in
the production, though, so it’s fair to assume she was okay with the liberties
taken.

While
I enjoyed I Am The Night for what it
was, I can’t help thinking there’s a missed opportunity to delve more deeply
into what all those secrets can do to a person, especially given the parallels
in our current climate and especially when it comes to racial identity.  By overstuffing the plot, the creators wind up
with a lot of filling, but no real sustenance.

I Am
The Night premieres January
28, 2019 on TNT.

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