After his ride bails, a college student (Riz Ahmed) borrows
his immigrant father’s taxi without consent and drives into the city to attend
a weekend blowout but instead winds up with an alluring fare, a system full of
booze and pills, and a murder one charge for which he is caught ostensibly red
handed. Hurled into the protracted workings of the justice system and the lion’s
den at Riker’s Island, he pins his hopes on a neurotic, eczema stricken pettifogger
(John Turturro) and a powerful celebrity inmate (Michael Kenneth Williams) who
has taken a suspicious interest in him. Drawing on the BBC series Criminal Justice as a
model, Steven Zaillain and Richard Price craft a seemingly knowing,
intelligible, and even subtly humorous miniseries that burns with a starkly quiet intensity that
is often agonizing to watch,while almost managing to successfully fuse a
satisfying mystery narrative into its sociorealistic agenda. Turturro and Ahmed
are fantastic.
**** out of ****
