SOMETHING HIDDEN BENEATH THE SNOW
The snow and ice of Jersey City is the setting for ‘Seven Seconds’, Veena Sud’s adaptation of a Russian film, writes
Page 52 March 18, 2018
After her success with the threeseason US adaptation of Danish noir series The Killing , writer and producer Veena Sud has joined the line of television creatives who’ve moved on to the irresistible lure of Netflix. She joins bigger names such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, who are all finding homes at the streaming service. For her adaptation of The Killing, Sud relocated the action to interminably wet Seattle in winter and for her first Netflix show, Seven Seconds — adapted from a Russian film, The Major — the Canadian-born writer sticks to the noirish atmosphere of winter in the snow and ice of Jersey City.
The show begins with a killing and we know from its first episode who’s responsible and how it’s attempted to be covered up. Newly recruited narcotics squad officer Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) is frantically driving to aid his pregnant wife in hospital when he hits something in the snow. He gets out of the car, shocked and dazed, only to see the wheel of a bicycle spinning underneath his truck. He calls his squad boss, Mike DiAngelo
(David Lyons), who with the rest of the crew rushes over and convinces Jablonski that in the age of Ferguson, Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter, a white cop knocking over a black teenager on a bike is not going to be good for any of them.
That black teen’s name is Bernard Butler, and the investigation into his death and the effects on both Jablonski and Butler’s religious mother, Latrice (Regina King), become the focus of Sud’s slow-burning 10part show. It’s also a case which provides an opportunity for professional and personal redemption to functional alcoholic and psychologically scarred assistant district attorney KJ Harper (Clare-Hope Ashitey) and Jersey police detective Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley) who, like Sud’s odd-ball cop pairing in The Killing, form a dysfunctional couple bound together first by necessity and later by mutual recognition of their failings and strengths.
While Ashitey and Mosley drive the story through their investigation, it’s really twotime Emmy winner King whose struggle to come to terms with her son’s death and the It’s a show about the search for a missing British child in France. I found it to be a fascinating and creative drama about child trafficking. unknown aspects of his life that keep you watching. As she proved in the anthology crime series American Crime, King has an enviable versatility and ability to move from calm endurance to frustrated vulnerability that makes her not just compelling as an actor but gives her character a large dose of what-the-hell-is-she-going-to-do-next appeal that keeps everyone from the cops to the investigators to her husband and, finally the audience, guessing.
There are problems with some characterisation and pacing, however. King’s performance and a solid if sometimes slightly on-the-nose examination of racial tensions in the American judicial system manage to make Seven Seconds worth continuing to watch over its 10-hour running time — in spite of its familiar Law and Order structure.
We’ve seen plenty of dramas about bad cops and good, messed-up ones and grief and murderous Shakespearean pacts before. But there’s something hidden beneath the snow in the constant shadow of the Statue of Liberty looming over Jersey City that gives Sud’s twist on the formula the extra kick it needs to keep us glued to our screens. In the end that’s about the truest test of what television in the age of bingewatch streaming needs to achieve, and Seven Seconds passes that test more than adequately if not quite with flying colours.
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LSeven Seconds is currently streaming on Netflix. A Lovers