DEVIL’S WORK
I Am the Night
NETWORK TNT AIR DATE Mondays, 9 p.m. 3 Wonder Woman
director Patty Jenkins reunites with Chris Pine for this True Detective- esque limited series, a 1965 noir tale with supernatural undertones. Pine plays a disgraced reporter with a heroin habit and PTSD from his days as a Korean War hero, and India Eisley is a biracial teen who can pass for white but has grown up in an all-black community. Eisley’s attempt to find her white birth mother (via Connie Nielsen as a grandmother figure of sorts, with an accent that wanders from scene to scene, occasionally line to line) intersects with the story — involving an abortion doctor, a twisted sex cult, and perhaps the Black Dahlia killings — that ruined Pine’s career, offering him a shot at redemption if he can live long enough to write it. The mystery’s too slow and thin to sustain six hours, and Eisley can’t quite carry her half of the story. But Pine delivers an impressively committed, twitchy performance as a far more damaged type than he usually plays. And Jenkins and her collaborators deliver some macabre images that live up to Nielsen’s suggestion that “what is dreamt is often more real than what we think of as real.” A.S.