Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I Am The Night’ On TNT, A Story Inspired By The Black Dahlia Murder

The 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka Black Dahlia, captivated the attention of Los Angeles primarily because a prominent gynecologist (Dr. George Hodel) was the main suspect. But no one could ever pin the murder on him. Making the story even more intriguing is the presence of his granddaughter Fauna Hodel, who was given away at birth because she was biracial. The events surrounding Fauna’s desire to find out about herself has become the basis of a new fictional miniseries, I Am The Night, produced by Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, who also directs three episodes. Read on for more…

I AM THE NIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As we push in from a desolate desert landscape, we eventually push into a small house on a suburban street. Inside, a mother fusses over her teenage daughter’s hair before the teen leaves for school.

The Gist: Jimmy Lee (Golden Brooks) is a single mother, living with her daughter Pat (India Eisley) in Sparks, Nevada. It’s 1965, and the civil rights movement hasn’t seemed to reach Nevada yet, as Pat, who is biracial, painfully finds out every day. A new girl, who is White, wants to sit with Pat at lunch, but is warned away by a classmate that says she’s at the “Negro table.” But on the other hand, she can’t walk home from work and snog with her Black boyfriend without the town’s racist cops thinking that he’s harassing a White girl. And Jimmy Lee is no prize, constantly drunk, lamenting the loss of her singing career due to Pat, and wishing that Pat realized that better things are ahead for her.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Jay Singletary (Chris Pine), a journalist and former Marine that takes scandalous photos as a stringer for the Examiner, is constantly lamenting the career he lost. He used to be an investigative reporter for the Times, but in the late ’40s a case broke him emotionally and he hasn’t been able to recover. He takes a gig from a Times writer to photograph a hacked up body in the morgue, but after he’s caught sneaking in and hiding in a drawer, a dirty cop named Bills (Yul Vaszquez) beats the snot out of him.

Back in Sparks, Pat sneaks into her mother’s closet and finds a birth certificate for a Fauna Hodel. When she confronts Jimmy Lee the next morning, Pat’s mother angrily confesses that Pat is in fact Fauna, the biracial granddaughter of a prominent Los Angeles doctor. Jimmy Lee, then the wife of a preacher as well as a casino singer, agreed to adopt Fauna after an encounter with Fauna’s grandmother at the casino. Fauna decides to get in touch with Dr. George Hodel (Jefferson Mays), and her grandfather invites her to Los Angeles. After a dispute with Jimmy Lee, she leaves for Tinseltown, only to lose touch with George.

Our Take: I Am The Night is based on Fauna Hodel’s autobiography, but it’s more “inspired by” the events in her book than anything else. It essentially takes the notorious Black Dahlia murder case, where the notoriously weird Dr. George Hodel was a main suspect, and revisits it a decade and a half later, through the eyes of Singletary and Fauna. Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins is one of the executive producers, along with Pine and writer Sam Sheridan, and she directs three of the episodes. Her slick style can be seen in the pilot, in scenes where she uses expansiveness to signal insignificance, in Fauna’s case, or sheer power, in Dr. Hodel’s case.

But the pilot moves somewhat slowly, reveling in exposition and monologuing but not telling us much about the actual story. It goes on parallel paths, with Fauna discovering who she is and Jay struggling through yet another day in a job that makes him feel morally bankrupt. If we don’t know the story of Hodel or her nefarious grandfather ahead of time, we’re left at the end of the first episode no more clear on what the story is than where we were at the beginning. We’re assuming that Fauna and Singletary meet up in Episode 2, but they’re still on parallel tracks as the pilot closes.

Don’t get us wrong, though: The performances all around are great. While we got tired of Jimmy Lee’s drunken speeches by the end of the episode, Golden Brooks does a fine job with them. Eisley plays Fauna’s innocence, mixed with a strong desire to find out more about herself, quite well. And Pine is utterly convincing as the troubled Singletary. Perhaps as the six-episode miniseries moves forward, the pace will pick up a bit. We hope so, given the talent involved.

Sex and Skin: Nothing, besides the parting shot described below.

Parting Shot: We pan in on a mansion where rich men look like they’re being greeted by high-class prostitutes. Dr. Hodel is told that Fauna called. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. Singletary looks at his old newspaper clippings about Dr. Hodel being a suspect in a murder. And Fauna is in a phone booth being warned off by her step-grandmother Corinna (Connie Nielsen) to stay far, far away from Dr. Hodel.

Sleeper Star: We only see Mays in a couple of scenes in the pilot, and we hear his voice on the phone, but holy moly, he is making George Hodel one of the creepiest characters we’ve seen in a while. And he’s basing it on a real person!

Most Pilot-y Line: One of the things we wondered about in the pilot is why it seems everyone in Sparks has a southern accent. There are ways to explain it, but it made us think at first that Fauna was living in Mississippi rather than Nevada. Also: The original title of this miniseries was One Day She’ll Darken, a reference to Jimmy Lee’s speech where she hopes that Pat/Fauna’s skin tone would darken so she’d fit in better. Makes us wonder why TNT changed the name to the less provocative I Am The Night.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The performances in I Am The Night make the miniseries worth watching, even if the storytelling hasn’t quite gelled yet by the end of the pilot.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream I Am The Night on TNT