Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Sunday, July 10. All times are Eastern.
Top picks
The Night Of (HBO, 9 p.m.): While HBO’s in a bit of a slump on its non-Game Of Thrones serialized drama front—fake-out renewal for Vinyl, constant production delays on Westworld, True Detective season two considered lousy even by the network’s executives—it’s been knocking it out of the park with its limited-event series. Tonight sees the latest addition to that canon with The Night Of, an adaptation of the British series Criminal Justice originally spearheaded by the late James Gandolfini. A young Pakistani-American (Riz Ahmed) wakes up to find the woman he spent a drug-fueled night with dead, and his only hope of staying out of prison is a shady attorney (John Turturro). Joshua Alston, in his pre-air review, says that not only is it an exemplary example of murder mystery storytelling but “everything that HBO has wanted out of a drama… is available in spades”:
[Steven] Zaillian’s direction is never less than confident and doesn’t feel obtrusive even at its showiest. And not enough can be said about the ensemble cast, which is stacked to the rafters with ringers; elite character actors fill even the most thankless roles. (A drinking game could be made of spotting the familiar faces that pop up for glorified walk-on roles.) But no actor is wasted, because no character is wasted. Each moment and every exchange are pieces of a misshapen puzzle that may or may not come together by the end of the eight-episode run.
To help guide viewers through every theory and development, Alasdair Wilkins will be on hand for weekly coverage.
Endeavor (PBS, 9 p.m.): The Inspector Morse prequel wraps up its third series tonight, as young Morse is trapped in a bank during a robbery and realizes he’s part of a plan to conceal another crime. Could that crime be the creation of undead Kingsguard in the bank’s vault? Sorry, we just realized this week that Anton Lesser (better known as Qyburn) plays Morse’s superior officer, and we’re going through enough Game Of Thrones withdrawal that we’ll latch on to any parallels.