TNT’s I Am The Night is for fans of retro L.A. noir—and, more importantly, of Chris Pine
Over the past ten years, Chris Pine has played Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, the vintage comic book heartthrob Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman, Tom Clancy’s brilliant government intelligence tactician Jack Ryan in Shadow Recruit, Cinderella’s prince in Into The Woods, and the Murry children’s lost dad in A Wrinkle In Time. And then there’s what may be his two best roles: as the heartbroken bank robber in Hell Or High Water, and as the voice of the idealized version of Peter Parker in Into The Spider-Verse.
In short: This guy’s a bona fide movie star. He’s handsome and soulful—arguably the best of “the Chrises.”
So what the heck’s he doing in a basic cable miniseries?
If nothing else, the first episode of TNT’s six-part I Am The Night makes it clear what drew Pine to this project. He looks to be having a blast playing the reckless, drug-addicted tabloid reporter Jay Singletary: an archetypal neo-noir antihero, as crafty as he is damaged. Pine’s Jay is halfway between Russell Crowe’s Bud White and Guy Pearce’s Ed Exley in the movie L.A. Confidential—and don’t think that the series’ creators are unaware of the similarities. In fact, the best way to describe I Am The Night is “James Ellroy: The TV Show.”
It’s less obvious from episode one whether this show is going to measure up to its influences, or if it’ll just be a decent Chris Pine showcase, filled out with a lot of derivative plot and play-acting. One hour in, I Am The Night is a decidedly mixed bag.
“Pilot” spends most of its running time introducing the story’s main characters. Singletary is a fairly easy guy to “get.” About halfway through the episode, one of his colleagues, Peter Sullivan (played by Leland Orser) vaguely suggests that Jay has a long and complicated backstory. (“What’s wrong with him? Where do I even start?”) But the gist actually comes across fairly quickly. Jay was a marine. Jay saw some messy combat. Jay came home to resume his gig as a crack Los Angeles journalist, before one big bear of a story knocked him into the gutter. (“Some stories you can’t tell,” Sullivan says. “Some stories don’t want to be told. Some stories will eat you alive.”)
The details of this fabled assignment-gone-wrong are left untold for now, but presumably it has to do with the real subject of I Am The Night (more on that in a moment); and with the miniseries’ other lead. India Eisley plays a character introduced as “Pat,” the light-skinned teenage daughter of an irascible mom, Jimmie Lee (Golden Brooks), living in a working class suburb of Reno, Nevada. One drunken night, Jimmy Lee finally tells the child the truth: Her real name is Fauna Hodel, the granddaughter of the rich L.A. doctor George Hodel. Many years ago, a desperate stranger in a Las Vegas bathroom offered Fauna to Jimmy to raise, and the childless preacher’s wife jumped at the offer, even though disguising a little blond-haired girl as black for a decade-plus has been excruciatingly difficult for both of them.
By the end of this first episode, Fauna has left Nevada to pursue her Hodel heritage, unaware that grandpa George has already been trying to track her down. Her storyline lands in a promising place when the hour’s up—which is a good thing, because for most of I Am The Night’s part one, pretty much every scene outside of L.A. is a drag.
This isn’t Eisley’s fault—or Brooks’, for that matter. Both actresses attack their parts with passion. But much of the Fauna storyline so far plays like a remedial lesson in mid-‘50s race-relations, with bit-players hitting only the biggest, broadest notes in a series of pro forma scenes: Fauna gets rejected by the white girls in the lunchroom; Fauna gets threatened by the black girls at the after-school hangout; the cops stop Fauna when she’s walking home from work with her dark-skinned boyfriend; and so on. It’s a very curtailed and over-familiar depiction of this young woman’s life. There’s apparently not much more to her than the struggles she’s faced.