Who is the night? Six episodes later, this writer has no idea. That’s pretty typical of “I Am The Night,” as well. Ostensibly the story of Pat (India Eisley), a teenager who discovers her mother Jimmie Lee (Golden Brooks, terrific) has been lying to her about her background and that her name is actually Fauna Hodel, the series follows Fauna/Pat away from her Nevada town and into Los Angeles, where she seeks her biological grandfather, the famous doctor George Hodel (Jefferson Mays, bizarrely underused). The idea of tracing a young woman’s quest to untangle the mysteries of her own heritage, and using that quest as a means to enter—as if by accident—one of the most famous true crime stories in American history, is an interesting one. Imagine tugging on the threads of your own biography and a boogeyman falls out. But once the name Hodel actually enters the story, Fauna becomes an audience avatar, rather than a character experiencing something of which few people could even conceive. Her story’s been swallowed alive by a genre, and by the actor anchoring that portion of the story.
That’s absolutely not a crack at Chris Pine, who lends the Singletary portion of the story the depth and nuance that keep “I Am The Night” from becoming an unbearable slog. (The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of some of the performances in last year’s “The Alienist,” another gory TNT crime adaptation that relied on style and movie stars rather than substance.) While Fauna Hodel was a real person, and the events of the series based in part on her autobiography, Singletary is an invention, and a walking staple of the crime genre: the hard-bitten but secretly good-hearted detective/reporter whose career was derailed by the Case That Got Away. Singletary’s big fish was George Hodel, Fauna’s grandfather, who oh, by the way, was suspected of several murders and other nefarious dealings, and whose teenage daughter Tamar accused him of sexual assault.
In this fictional exploration of the story, Singletary’s reporting on the Hodel trial turned him from hotshot journalist to flailing addict and paparazzi, and a mysterious phone call telling him to go back to chasing the story sends him back down the rabbit hole. He’s the only one who wants Hodel brought to justice; he seems to be the only one who finds him suspicious. All others either refuse to believe the possibility of Hodel’s guilt, or are bought and paid for. One man against the world, and that man is not in great shape.
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