A police cover-up fuels the drama in Netflix’s ‘Seven Seconds’
Here’s the setup: A white New Jersey police officer, who’s late to meet his pregnant wife at the hospital for her sonogram, is speeding through a desolate park when his car hits a black teenager on a bicycle.
It’s an accident, but the officer — Peter (Beau Knapp) — calls his fellow cops — and no one calls for an ambulance.
The cover-up is the opening of “Seven Seconds,” a new 10-part dramatic series on Netflix that drops Friday. Its executive producer, Veena Sud (“The Killing,” “Cold Case”), has said that the series is an attempt to look behind the headlines involving racially charged incidents like the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died in police custody in 2015.
“Don’t you read the news? There are no accidents anymore,” one cop tells Peter later, justifying their cover-up. “Chicago, Baltimore, every white cop who has killed a black kid …” He doesn’t have to finish the sentence.
“Seven Seconds” can be a bit obvious at times — a shot of blood in the snow with the Statue of Liberty seen off in the distance — but ultimately it settles into a worthwhile characterdriven crime thriller.
As former president Richard Nixon learned, a coverup can snowball and become worse than the original crime. That rapidly becomes the case in the series. The story is about people under pressure trapped in an impossible dilemma that grows deadlier. Tamped-down prejudices, family secrets, and fears eventually boil over.
British actress ClareHope Ashitey plays lowlevel prosecutor K.J. Harper. She is desperately unhappy, buried in paperwork, drinking and singing karaoke (badly) at a club. She’s given the hit-and-run case of the teen, who lies unconscious in a hospital.
She is partnered with a detective, Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley), a white cop who isn’t interested in digging into the case, pegging the victim as a gang member because he has an expensive bike.
In fact, Fish is ready to charge a suspect supplied by Peter’s cohorts, but after K.J. finds inconsistencies in the story he reluctantly helps her pursue other leads.
No one in “Seven Seconds” is without guilt. Nor is anyone completely awful. Even the head of a narcotics unit, Mike (David Lyons), who is also the leader of the cover-up, can be seen as making the best of untenable situations — both within his department and on the streets.
The always-reliable Regina King leads the series’ strong ensemble as the victim’s distraught mother; Russell Hornsby (“Grimm”) plays the father. Their elder
son (Zackary Momoh) is a soldier stationed in Afghanistan, having escaped to the Army to get away from the gangs.
K.J. is only able to investigate the case because she convinces her politically ambitious boss that the victim’s family are churchgoers from the black community and likely voters. “Seven Seconds,” meant to be an anthology if it’s picked up, is similar to recent network series like “American Crime” and “Shots Fired” in that it explores social and racial tensions in a personal way. At its best, the new series is more nuanced than the others because its premise grows out of bad decisions more than bad intentions. Dramatically, it takes about two to three episodes for the series to kick in. Fish, who prefers dogs over people, and K.J., who comes from an affluent black family, are an odd couple but with some nice twists.
“Seven Seconds” may not be the type of series to binge, but once you’re into it, you are likely to stay around. The series’ virtue is that it offers a different — and often thoughtful — take on one of the biggest hot-button issues of the day.