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Review: ‘Seven Seconds,’ a Grim Account of Whose Lives Matter

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By James Poniewozik

• Feb. 22, 2018

“Seven Seconds” is a crime story in which you know immediately who did it. Pete Jablonski (Beau Knapp), a Jersey City police officer, is driving through a park on the way to the hospital to meet his pregnant wife, when he hits something. Or someone, it turns out: There’s a bicycle in the snow, and a trail of blood.

In shock, Pete calls Michael DiAngelo (David Lyons), his sergeant in his narcotics unit, who finds the victim: an African-American teenage boy. They have to cover it up, DiAngelo says. Otherwise, he adds, Pete will be crucified, payback for “Ferguson, Chicago, Baltimore — every white cop who ever killed a black kid.”

The boy is in a deep coma. We never hear him speak, see only a few glimpses of him taking his last bike ride. But we hear his name again and again: Brenton Butler, which hangs over the story like others — Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray — that have become totems and rallying cries.

The cover-up leads inexorably to further crimes. But the true mystery in “ Seven Seconds ” is, Will Brenton get justice? What would justice look like? And how many other lives will be destroyed in the wake of Brenton’s?

These are timely questions emerging from a too familiar tragedy, even if “Seven Seconds” is ultimately not as well executed as it is well intentioned.

“Seven Seconds” comes from Veena Sud, whose last series, “The Killing,” was at its best a mournful look at murder’s toll on the survivors, the accused and the investigators. (Just as “The Killing” was based on a Danish series, “Seven Seconds” is based on the Russian film “The Major.”) But in its initial case, which stretched beyond the first season, “The Killing” became a grim slog of red herrings and implausible twists. It later rallied , but never wholly recovered.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, netflix's seven seconds takes too long to get where it’s going.

There is a lot to like that's buried in Netflix’s new drama, “Seven Seconds,” but it suffers so greatly from what has been called Netflix Bloat that it’s hard to get to the quality underneath. It’s a show that is so full of pregnant pauses and self-important segues that it becomes frustrating in the way it wallows in its darkness. Of course, one might argue that a story about grief and injustice should take its time, and I’m certainly not advocating for quick-cut melodrama, but it’s impossible to shake the feeling that “Seven Seconds” could have been a 5- or 6-episode season instead of the 10 dropping on you this Friday. Although, you could do worse on what is likely a rainy/snowy February weekend than locking yourself in with this well-acted melodrama about a criminal cover-up and a mother’s pain.

Part of my reservation and frustration is that I so wish I could recommend “Seven Seconds” wholeheartedly because of how much I admire the talent of star Regina King . The fact that she was never nominated for an Emmy for her brilliant work on “Southland” is a travesty, only slightly lessened by the fact that the Academy simply couldn’t ignore her on “American Crime”—she was nominated for all three seasons and won for two. She’s one of those actresses who qualifies as “always good, often great,” and I’d use those words to describe her work here as Latrice Butler, a grieving mother whose son Brenton is hit by a car in the opening scenes of “Seven Seconds.”

Hit and runs happen every day in America, but the one that happens to Latrice’s son in “Seven Seconds” becomes a national story because the car happens to be driven by a white cop. In the opening scenes of the show, Peter Jablonski ( Beau Knapp ) is rushing to get to the hospital to see his pregnant wife because he’s worried they’re going to lose the baby after she has some medical issues. He’s panicked and speeding. And he hits Brenton on his bicycle. Jablonski is a cop, and he’s recently become a part of a team of narcotics officers led by the aggressive Mike Diangelo ( David Lyons ). Instead of calling 911, Jablonski calls his new superior officer, and Diangelo quickly tries to cover it up. They frame Brenton as a ‘banger’ who should have been in school, and even try to pin the hit and run on a local drunk.

An Assistant DA named KJ Harper ( Clare-Hope Ashitey ) gets the case, and she senses something’s not right. Digging a little deeper with another wise-cracking Jersey City cop named ‘Fish’ Rinaldi ( Michael Mosley ), they uncover the truth, and race relations in Jersey City explode. Meanwhile, Latrice’s family is fractured when her religious husband ( Russell Hornsby ) and military brother-in-law Seth (Zackary Momoh) fight through their grief in different ways. Seth has a gang background and doesn’t embrace religion like Brenton’s family. Oh, and to add to the drama, KJ is an alcoholic, and Jablonski has a new baby at home when his life spirals out of control.

Clearly, there’s a lot of dramatic material in “Seven Seconds,” but it often feels like an exercise in miserablism. Creator Veena Sud and her team wallow and linger in pain, whether it’s extended scenes of Latrice watching over her son in the hospital or the state of anxious panic in which Jablonski lives after the accident. But it often seems hollow, despite great work by King and a solid turn from Knapp. In too many instances, “Seven Seconds” feels caught between melodrama and cultural commentary, and it’s not quite enough of either. Diangelo and his gang of drug-planting criminals feel like caricatures out of a “Shades of Blue” spin-off, and then the show whips back to the Butler home, where King grounds it in something more relatable. It’s a show that’s all over the map tonally, sometimes feeling like an extended version of “ Mystic River ,” but there’s a reason that was a movie and not a series—it’s a difficult energy to maintain for ten hours.

However, there are performances that often elevate “Seven Seconds” above its flaws. Ashitey has a fascinating character in that KJ is the black sheep of the family, and she captures well the kind of person who flees from conflict or stress into a bottle or a bed. Her scenes with Mosley become the most interesting on the show because they bridge the gap between the melodrama of the Butler/Jablonski homes and the corruption of the police station. They come out more believable (and entertaining) than either extreme. Also, Mosley is quite a TV star in the making—charming and likable in equal measure.

“Seven Seconds” does eventually get interesting narratively, but it’s not until about episode five. Something happens at the end of episode four that really injects some adrenalin into the narrative, but I kept wondering why it took so long to get there. In the old days of network television, there was a sense that shows had to rush to keep an audience for the almighty rating. I’m not saying that’s the way TV should be to support a creator, but the full-season orders at Netflix may be swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction, allowing creators to meander when they could use a sense of urgency. It certainly seems to be happening with their Marvel shows, every single one of which feels bloated and sags at times, and I’ve noticed it in a lot of their dramas too. There’s a solid, more consistent and shorter version of “Seven Seconds” within the 10-episode version premiering this week. It’s up to you if you have the time to find it.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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'Seven Seconds' Review: Netflix's Latest Is An Addictive Procedural

Netflix's new series   Seven Seconds is an addictive procedural drama that starts off as a murder mystery and turns into something else. The show isn't so much concerned with the crime at hand as it is the fallout – the trauma that befalls relatives, and the way such events can impact several different lives.  Seven Seconds  has big issues on its mind, particularly tensions that arise in a community when dealing with a racist police force. Ultimately, it's not entirely successful with its bigger issues, but a series of stellar performances elevate  Seven Seconds into something worth watching.

Our  Seven Seconds review continues below. Some minor spoilers follow.

Seven Seconds hails from Veena Sud , who developed the American version of The Killing . Like that former AMC series, Seven Seconds is a gritty, often disheartening crime drama that has more on its mind than just a central mystery. This is a show that's very much embroiled in current events. Seven Seconds uses its central crime – the hit and run death of a black child named Brenton Butler in Jersey City – to delve into a drama that deals with issues of race. Namely, the hot-button matter of race relations between an unabashedly racist police force and the black community they push up against. The person who runs down Brenton happens to be a (white) cop, speeding towards the hospital after he gets an emergency call about his pregnant wife. The accident is clearly that – an accident. But when the distraught cop's fellow officers arrive on the scene, they're quick to cover the crime up. The way they see it, the minute the public hears about a white cop running over a black kid, it'll blow up into just another story about a racist police force. In attempting to cover up this situation, they inadvertently create it. It's not long before their terrible action blows up in the media, and the community. And it's not long before someone is able to connect the dots and discover it was cops who did the foul deed. That's the main set-up of Seven Seconds , but the show branches off from there and ventures down more avenues. There's an assistant prosecutor with a drinking problem; a detective with marital issues; a drug addicted witness to the crime with her own baggage. Then there are the tormented parents of the boy so coldly run down and left for dead, struggling to come to terms with their sudden loss while being simultaneously rejected by the system that should be helping them. This is all big, heavy stuff, and Seven Seconds makes all of it work, though it occasionally takes shortcuts that require more than a standard suspension of disbelief.

The Characters

Clare-Hope Ashitey takes the lead as KJ Harper, an assistant prosecutor who gets put in charge of the case involving the hit and run. Before she gets involved with the show's central mystery, we see KJ heavily inebriated, taking part in a bit of drunk karaoke at a local bar. It soon becomes apparent that this isn't a one-time thing; KJ has a drinking problem, and her career is in a bit of a tailspin. She shows up to court unprepared, and she's still reeling from an affair with her boss. Ashitey, who also appeared in Children of Men , is stellar in the role. KJ may fall into the standard "flawed protagonist" category that so many modern shows seem to embrace, but Ashitey's performance is layered and compelling. The way she handles KJ's constant waffling – she's determined to make a difference one minute, then terrified to confront a grieving family the next – is impressive to behold. The only thing that trips the character up is an underdeveloped backstory involving family history. The co-lead of the series, or at least the character who has the second biggest part to play after Ashitey, is Regina King as Latrice Butler, mother of hit-and-run victim Brenton Butler. King has the big, emotional moments of the series, and she never fails to deliver. This is the type of powerful, raw performance that gets awards season attention, and rightfully so. Latrice and her husband are deeply religious, but after their son is taken from them, Latrice's faith falters, and she spirals downward to a point where she's sleeping in her car and contemplating buying a gun to get revenge. Not all of the character motivations are entirely believable on paper, but King's fierce performance manages to make them all work. A surprise stand-out of the series is Michael Mosley , who turns in a funny, quirky performance as Joe "Fish" Rinaldi, a homicide detective who teams up with KJ to look into the Butler case. Like Will Graham on Hannibal , Fish has a house full of stray dogs he's taken in, and the show gets great mileage from quick sight-gags, like Fish reading a dog-centric magazine while waiting to meet another character. While Fish is ultimately on the side of good, and more often than not does the right thing, he's still not above slipping into the type of prejudices that plague the police department. His first assumption when he starts looking into the Brenton Butler case is that Brenton is a banger who likely stole the expensive bike he was riding when he was run down. The chemistry between Mosley and Ashitey, which starts off adversarial but settles into a mutual respect, is a big draw. Russell Hornsby is a powerhouse as Isaiah Butler, husband to Latrice and father to Brenton. It's clear Latrice and Isaiah's marriage is slightly distant before Brenton's death, but afterwards, the rift between the couple widens drastically. While King's storyline as Latrice goes off in its own potentially dangerous direction, Hornsby's Isaiah struggles with his own inner turmoil. He keeps most of his rage and sadness inside, until it erupts in fury. Along the way, he begins to learn things about his son he never know, which complicate things further. Hornsby has a commanding presence, and the show could actually use more of him. Beau Knapp plays Officer Pete Jablonski, the cop who runs over Brenton on quiet, snowy morning. Jablonski is the newest member of an elite anti-gang and drug unit, and after the accident, his team are the people he calls. The team are quick to help him cover things up, but at first, Jablonski seems determined to do the right thing. He wants to turn himself in – it was an accident, after all. Even after the cover-up first goes into place, Jablonski considers ending things. But the deeper into the hole he gets, the more violent and anxious he becomes. Jablonski is the most fleshed-out of all the characters, and Knapp plays him with a jittery, unnerving intensity. The rest of the police squad who purportrate the cover-up consists of actors David Lyons , Raul Castillo and Patrick Murney . Of these three, Lyons, as the team leader, stands out the most, as he seems to be the most duplicitous. While all three of the actors do well in their roles, their characters are the least engaging of the series. Part of this revolves around the fact that the series puts them in more and more outlandish scenarios, to the point where they start to resemble villains from a comic book rather than a team of corrupt cops. One action carried out by the team near the show's conclusion feels particularly ludicrous, and saps the show of  some power. The rest of the cast is rounded out by Michelle Veintimilla , playing Jablonski's Lady Macbeth-like wife, who is more than happy to help him purportrate a cover-up as long as it keeps her new family safe; Corey Champagne as a friend of Brendan Butler, who knows more than he's letting on; and Nadia Alexander , as a teenage junkie who happens to witness the accident and develops a sometimes friendly, sometimes adversarial relationship with Fish as the cop tries to get her to testify against Jablonski and company. All three performers are quite good, with Champagne in particular having a lengthy, dramatic monologue in which he nearly steals the show.

Is It Too Long, Like Every Netflix Show?

Yes. While Seven Seconds doesn't make the mistake of Marvel shows and run for a torturous 13 episodes, it does overstay its welcome at 10. This becomes apparent in the last four episodes in particular. The first chunk of the series moves at a quick, breakneck pace, burning through characters and storylines with urgency and excitement, making the series inherently bingeable. Then, the show all but grinds to a halt, and staggers across its finish-line. It's as if the writers were on a roll, then realized they had to stretch the story across 10 episodes and started to deliberately pace themselves. The show suffers as a result. Had Seven Seconds been whittled down to 8 episodes instead of 10, it would be a much better series.

What Doesn’t Work

The aforementioned episode count of the show really does bog it down. Without getting into too many spoilers, Seven Seconds all but wraps-up its storyline by episode 7. The minute I realized this, and then realized there were still three more episodes to go, my heart sank. I all-but-knew this was a sign that show was going to torch the goodwill it had built up to drag the story out even longer. Sure enough, I was correct. To be clear: the decisions the show makes in its final three episodes make sense, but they don't quite work with everything that's come before. Another problem Seven Seconds has involves shortcuts. While it's understandable that a TV series wouldn't want to delve into the frequently-boring minuta of police work, more often than not, the show will have characters jumping to dead-on conclusions. The result seems often forced and unbelievable. On that same note, Seven Seconds has a real problem involving characters who neglect to mention things to each other. There's precedence for this. After all, if characters in Jane Austen novels would just confess their feelings and motivations to each other, the books would be only one page long. Still, there's a way to make this work, and Seven Seconds doesn't quite nail it down. As a result, there's a nagging sense that if certain characters would just open their mouths and tell other characters things, Seven Seconds would be a lot cleaner, and a lot more engaging.

As mentioned above, the show really does move quite well. It's addictive television, and it's addictive in a way that doesn't feel manipulative. Some shows will end nearly every episode with a cliffhanger to suck you back in; Seven Seconds avoids this, but still manages to hook the viewer to the point where you feel you must keep watching to see where the show is going to go. The late, great Jonathan Demme directed one of the episodes, and, needless to say, his episode is the best. It's a haunting, quiet episode filled with reflective moments. It comes very early in the series, and one almost wishes the show had stuck with this method of storytelling a little longer before jumping into its mystery. Still, this is one of the very last things Demme directed, and it's a treat to watch his work. Beyond that, the real draw of Seven Seconds is the cast, particularly Clare-Hope Ashitey and Regina King, playing two very different women searching for the same thing. Both actresses take the show into interesting directions, and both are excellent at handling their overall arcs and emotional moments. Seven Seconds ultimately isn't your normal type of murder mystery show. It's more about the fallout; the way people deal with picking up the pieces following the traumatic event.

Seven Seconds arrives on Netflix February 23, 2018 .

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Action star Wesley Snipes (the Blade trilogy, U.S. Marshals, Passenger 57) is a professional thief whose high-stakes caper goes murderously wrong in this explosive, brilliantly unpredictable crime thriller. Captain Jack Tolliver (Snipes) is an ex-Delta Force commando leading what should have ben a clockwork-perfect armored car heist. Instead, he ends up with a priceless Van Gogh painting - and one of his crew ends up held hostage by the sadistic Russian gangsters who muscled in on the heist. Tolliver's only option: a suicidal rescue mission where enemies become allies, your best friend can be your worst nightmare, and survival is deadliest art of all.

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Netflix’s Seven Seconds Is a Timely, Flawed Drama About American Injustice

By Scott Meslow

TV dramas don't get much timelier than Seven Seconds . The new Netflix series, which arrived on Friday, is about the far-reaching consequences of a horrible incident in which Pete Jablonski (Beau Knapp), a white cop, accidentally runs over a black teenager named Brenton Butler on a bicycle. In a panic, Jablonski covers up the evidence with the help of his fellow officers. Over the following 10 hours, we follow along as an ever-increasing number of people are drawn into the aftermath of the crime.

The racial and political elements of Seven Seconds could hardly be more relevant in 2018, and it certainly doesn’t shy away from digging into them them. Early on, when Jablonski swears he’s going to come clean about what he did, his sergeant explicitly warns him against being at the center of an incident like the ones in Ferguson and Baltimore, where incidents of police violence against black citizens have led to national outcry. Later episodes tackle everything from the laziness of the courts system to the cruelty of a medical industry that would bankrupt a family trying to save their son’s life.

Seven Seconds was created by The Killing ’s Veena Sud, and it shares much of The Killing ’s strengths and weaknesses. The most obvious (and wisest) shift Seven Seconds makes to The Killing ’s formula is that there’s no mystery that kicks the story into motion. We know the identity of the criminal upfront. We’re just waiting for the rest of the show to catch up to us.

And that’s where Seven Seconds stumbles. Almost every Netflix drama is a few episodes too long. Even the really good ones end up spinning their wheels for an hour or two, in what feels like an effort to meet some prearranged quota. So it’s frustrating to see a show like Seven Seconds —so rich with potential—lose much of its power due to narrative bloat, which will likely derail plenty of would-be binge-watchers before the finale rolls. Does Seven Seconds have individual scenes that pack tremendous power? Definitely. Could it be exponentially more powerful if it had condensed its story into eight hours instead of 10? Definitely. Maybe six.

10 hours is a lot of time to fill, and Seven Seconds slackens when it should be at its most propulsive, repeatedly branching into third-rate subplots that delay the story’s logical climax. It’s not enough that Jablonski has a near-breakdown in his guilt about the cover-up his sergeant demands. He has to have a pregnant wife. (In what feels like a weird effort to goose our sympathies, he’s literally rushing to the hospital to see her when he hits Brenton Butler.) And his pregnant wife has to have an annoying cousin. And sure, why not a deadbeat dad who emerges from the gutter to hit him up for money?

There’s a cumulative effect to the sheer number of storylines Seven Seconds packs into its narrative—the ever-expanding ripple effect that a single, horrible crime can have on an entire community. In theory, that might sound like an empathetic, open-hearted way to explore this kind of tragedy, and it’s particularly heartbreaking when the situation gets so thorny that Brenton Butler, the actual victim of the crime, almost becomes an afterthought. You could, charitably, argue that that’s the point—that crimes, and our responses to them, can become so personal and abstracted that the inciting incident gets lost in the frenzy. Or you could argue that Seven Seconds would simply be a lot more powerful if it felt like we ever got to know the real Brenton Butler.

At its best, Seven Seconds is suffused with empathy for the lives of black Americans, and outraged at a legal system that fails, at literally every level, to protect them. It has a particular contempt for the institutions that discriminate out of laziness, indifference, and unexamined racism—a system that neglects the poorest and most ill-treated because no one with any actual power has spent a second thinking about them.

If only that were the whole show. By casting the net so wide, Seven Seconds ends up taking the spotlight away from its best stories, which center on the oddball pairing of the prosecutor (Clare Hope-Ashitey) and the detective (Michael Mosley) trying to solve the case, and the Butler family as they attempt to process this sudden, shocking twist in their lives (with Regina King, as Brenton’s mother, plumbing depths that see her veering between despair and fury). I audibly groaned whenever Seven Seconds cut away from these compelling characters to focus on the bland brotherhood of Jablonski’s corrupt police unit, which plays like a third-rate knockoff of The Shield.

By telling this story from so many perspectives, the ultimate message of Seven Seconds is that we’re all people, messy and complicated in our own ways. But this seemingly generous ethos has the unfortunate side effect of flattening out the narrative, as the story’s laziest and least thought-provoking elements are intermingled with its best. It also robs Seven Seconds of the moral urgency that fuels its finest moments. As a culture, we already spend too much time empathizing with the Pete Jablonskis of the world, and too little with the Butlers.

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7 Seconds Reviews

• 1 hr 41 mins
• Drama, Comedy, Suspense, Action & Adventure
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Topflight action fuels this thriller starring Wesley Snipes. When ex-commando John Tuliver (Snipes) unwittingly pilfers a priceless Van Gogh painting, he is pursued by gangsters who want the artwork for themselves. Tuliver's problems multiply when the well-armed goons kidnap his partner. Tamzin Outhwaite, Tamer Hassan.

Reviewed By: Jeremy Wheeler

Poor Wesley Snipes -- Blade: Trinity was a heartbreaking bomb, critically and financially, so what's a man to do but join Seagal and Van Damme in straight-to-video action flick hell? To be fair, sometimes these pics end up being entirely entertaining in a shameless action-movie way that Hollywood can shy away from now, though you can bet that 7 Seconds isn't one of them. Euro action is a strange subgenre that usually features greasy trash villains and hot blonde heroines desperate to hide their thick accents. The good or bad news (depending on your tolerance) is that this sucker is no different. You've got your standard car chases, an outrageous villain with cerebral palsy, and a love triangle that gives Snipes twice the amount of hot lovin' before the credits roll -- all in perfect bootleg Euro fashion. Sorely lacking in action, the former vampire hunter gets to do a bit of his patented breathless fist-to-gut combat, but not nearly enough to warrant the overabundance of plot that's in between.

Netflix’s Seven Seconds is the contrived, misery-riddled show I can’t stop watching

The cop show is almost the epitome of too many streaming series: not very good, but weirdly addicting.

by Emily St. James

I wrote off Netflix’s Seven Seconds , a crime thriller centered on the aftermath of a white police officer and his friends covering up the fact that he ran over a black boy on his bike, after watching two episodes on screener.

But then, a few days later, I came back and watched a couple more. And then a couple more a few days later, after having sworn it off again. Why did I keep doing this to myself?

There are things I like about it, to be sure. The performances (especially from lead Clare-Hope Ashitey ) are good across the board, and the show’s direction gives its hyper-dramatic moments room to breathe. (Notably, the second episode of the show is the final directorial effort from the late, lamented, Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme .) I also liked the way the writing didn’t always feel hurried, like it was okay taking time setting the characters out in their world, rather than rushing on to the next plot point.

The problem is the show’s plotting relies so heavily on coincidence and contrivance that it rips me out of the series every few scenes. Take, for instance, a moment from later in the season, when the investigation of the boy’s death hits a roadblock and the only way the story can advance is for one character to just happen to see the cop and realize he’s the guilty one. (Yes, it’s just as strained as that sounds.) It feels not like good writing, but like a cheat.

And because the show is headed up by Veena Sud (of the late AMC/Netflix series The Killing ), who never quite found a way to make her earlier series’ many, many coincidences work even in the context of an overwrought murder mystery, I had a vague sense of where all of this was headed.

But I kept coming back to the show. Some new contrivance would take me out of it for days at a time, and then I would come back for an episode or two, before having to drop it again. I’m still not finished, but I’m sure I’ll get there.

I can’t quite call this a recommendation of Seven Seconds , but I do think it’s indicative of something interesting. Netflix and other streaming platforms, for whatever reason, seem to be a place where this sort of contrived melodrama is more engrossing than it might be elsewhere.

Stories like Seven Seconds fare better the less you have to question their underlying assumptions

Seven Seconds is based on a Russian film named The Major , which I have never seen (though its plot synopsis roughly tracks with the story of the TV show). But both the basic plot of the film and TV show and the prior work of Sud suggest that the love of coincidence and contrivance is essentially baked into Seven Seconds , which, broadly speaking, fits into the loose genre of “Nordic noir.”

Named for the region of the world where it originated (which is to say, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark), Nordic noir is what I’ve come to think of less as a specific genre and more as an organizing set of storytelling principles. If it’s just a genre, strictly speaking, a “Nordic noir” is a dark, pulpy crime story, set in an unusual location. (You get added points for lots of snow.)

But if we think of Nordic noir more as a collection of storytelling ideas, then just as important is the use of wild coincidences that set stories in motion, moments that strain credulity but which we go with because they push our characters into realms of deeper and deeper uncertainty, even outright mistrust.

These sorts of storytelling devices are generally easier to take when presented in a context that is slightly outside of what we’re used to. From their Scandinavian settings to the fact that the dialogue isn’t in English, Nordic noirs tend to go down better for American audiences the more distance they have from the US itself.

You can see a fairly direct example of this in the British series Broadchurch (not a direct Nordic noir in terms of genre, but one that fits as well as anything in terms of storytelling tropes), which works beautifully, while its American remake, Grace Point , suffers despite using almost exactly the same storyline, with terrific actors trying to put it over the top. For whatever reason, the appeal of Nordic noir seems to work better the further away it is from home, at least for most American viewers.

But Seven Seconds may have found a way around this problem, and that stems from the platform on which it airs. Netflix’s batch-viewing model makes it harder to take the time to dwell on a coincidence or complication that might throw you out of the story, and even if the twists and turns of Seven Seconds become too miserable to bear, its “autoplay” feature ensures that you’ll be able to just go on to the next batch of misery. You won’t even have to think about it.

Nordic noirs and similar shows that explore the depths of human misery ultimately thrive less on plot mechanics and character beats than on all-encompassing mood. And for all of its faults, the Netflix model is great for building up a mood that slowly washes over you and carries you out into its pitch-black sea. Every time I think I’m done with Seven Seconds , it just keeps going, and something about the texture of its world, the way that the characters talk to each other, or the muted wintry setting, creates a feeling that seeps its way into my bones.

So, even though I would give up on Seven Seconds every couple of episodes, its weird, wintry world stuck with me and made me want to return, again and again. This also might be a side benefit of a completely different Netflix problem: All of the episodes of Seven Seconds are overlong, with some approaching 70 minutes, but that length adds up to more time to envelop viewers in the show’s world, tone, and mood.

We don’t really have the language to talk about this yet, about the way that watching a show in a streaming marathon can wear down a lot of defenses you’d put up if you were watching it week to week. Many of the things that turned me off of The Killing , from its oppressive mood to its overabundance of characters who existed solely to be tortured by the plot, are present and accounted for in Seven Seconds — but I don’t mind, because the fact I’m watching it on Netflix wraps me into the world, over and over again.

And I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, either. I’m watching, aren’t I? Isn’t that the whole point?

Seven Seconds is streaming on Netflix .

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Seven Seconds Is a Grim But Hypnotic Crime Drama

Seven Seconds,  the new Netflix drama about crooked cops covering up a hit-and-run accident and investigators trying to punish them, is another TV series about how a murder affects a community. It’s not the best or the worst of the lot, but at its most intelligent and heartfelt, it generates empathy for its characters, sadness at the culture that shaped them, and anger at the institutions that protect the worst among them. The unaffected emotion in every lead performance saves the bad scenes and elevates the good ones, and the overall spirit of the thing is unimpeachable.

The title describes the span of time in which Jersey City police officer Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) could’ve done the right thing after running over a teenage cyclist, Brenton Butler, in a snowy park while rushing to attend the birth of his first child. Instead of officially reporting the accident, Peter phones his supervisor on the drug task force, Mike Diangelo (David Lyons), who arrives at the scene with Jablonski’s two colleagues, Felix Osorio (Raúl Castillo) and Gary Wilcox (Patrick Murney), and instantly conspires to erase the crime. The men will later argue that they thought the boy was already dead — as if that excuses their behavior. The plain fact is that Peter is one of theirs, period, and they don’t want his life to be destroyed for what they perceive as a stroke of bad luck. There’s an element of racial resentment here, too: They’re convinced that, in the era of Black Lives Matter, the whole department will take an unjustified public-relations hit if news gets out that a white cop ran over a black teen, even though Peter didn’t mean to hit him.

What ensues is a cover-up that’s as cynical as it is stupid .  It shatters the lives of Brenton’s churchgoing parents, Latrice (Regina King) and Isaiah (Russell Hornsby), and his uncle, Seth (Zackary Momoh), a former gangbanger who just got out of the Air Force. An assistant prosecutor and alcoholic screwup named K.J. Harper (Clare-Hope Ashitey) partners up with recently divorced internal affairs detective Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley) to solve the crime. Their investigation leads them to a possible witness, a Catholic school girl named Nadine (Nadia Alexander), who’s addicted to heroin and turns tricks to support her habit.   The case builds and the plot thickens. K.J. is determined to prosecute the hit-and-run as a hate crime as well as a negligent homicide. The tactic feels morally right: Peter didn’t run over the boy because he was black, but he devalued his life because he was, and we see how instinctively racist most of the cops are, including the nonwhite ones. But it’s hard to prove in court.

Seven Seconds  is overseen by Veena Sud, the showrunner of AMC’s The Killing , and it displays a similar inability to quit while it’s ahead, often having characters explicate psychology verbally even though anyone who’s been paying attention can already guess which demons drove certain decisions. If you’ve seen or read an epic urban potboiler, you’ll recognize most of the types and many of the story beats. Some of the characters discover that they’re far worse than they’d imagined, while others discover an idealism they thought had vanished, or never existed.

At the same time, though,  Seven Seconds  has mostly freed itself from  The Killing ’s addiction to generating contrived surprises by withholding key facts, sending investigators down blind alleys, and pulling the rug out from under viewers at regular intervals. Here, what you see is what you get: a grim but hypnotic mini-series that plays like a hypothetical Richard Price rewrite of  The Bonfire of the Vanities , with grubby New Jersey locations and no rich people. There are three, maybe four big twists, but for most of its running time,  Seven Seconds  is not about what happened, but  why  it happened — a distinction that the series never loses sight of. The only mystery in the first five episodes is who leaked the identity of the driver to the media, and the series is less interested in answering that question than in watching what happens to the characters when the news gets out.

Sud, her writing staff, and her understated directors (including Ernest Dickerson and the late Jonathan Demme , who helmed the second episode in his final work as a filmmaker) show how hard it is to get even the most basic justice in the United States when you aren’t white and/or rich. Race and class are at the heart of each scene, even when the characters aren’t openly discussing them. “His life does not factor into the equation of this city,” an attorney tells Brenton’s mother, shortly before deciding not to represent her. The story is held together by the overlapping codes and jurisdictions of various tribes — including the Jersey City police department; the drug squad and their significant others; the local gangs, headed by Vontrell “Messiah” Odoms (Coley Speaks), who’s in a wheelchair but still formidable; and Letrice and Isaiah’s church — and by the desperation of people who instinctively close ranks to protect what they have, even when their actions confirm that they don’t deserve to have it.

There are elements that are needlessly overdone, like the many repetitious scenes of K.J., who’s cut from the same sour-smelling cloth as Paul Newman in  The Verdict , getting soused and humiliating herself, and the alpha-dog glowering of Diangelo, which is a shade too melodramatic for a tale that otherwise aspires to realism. (Lyons is a powerfully focused actor with star quality; it’s the show’s failure to modulate his intensity that’s the problem.) The first three episodes are rough going because of all the exposition that has to be laid out. But by the time you get to episode four, the gears are purring. The long stretch in the middle — episodes five through seven — is superb, and just when you think that the story has reached a logical, if too-pat stopping point, it keeps going in a way that complicates things, and emphasizes the fact that in life, the story isn’t over just because a few bad people got arrested.

The story becomes more intriguing the further away it wanders from the criminal investigation, which is rarely the case in this kind of project. The crime doesn’t just ignite the black community’s rage and put the police on notice, it shatters marriages and families, dredges up old resentments, rips the scabs off old wounds, and makes the more self-aware characters ask what, if anything, they’re going to take away from an event so momentous. This is a rare ten-hour story that justifies its running time and makes the heroes’ many victories and setbacks feel like acknowledgments of how tedious and frustrating cases like this can be, rather than Pavlovian chain-jerks designed to keep the audience watching whether they’re invested or not.

The commitment to showing a heightened version of life as it is, with a splash of Dickensian showmanship, makes  Seven Seconds  stand out. In the spirit of Sidney Lumet’s cop corruption films — and TV shows that obviously learned from them, like  The Wire  and  Show Me a Hero — Seven Seconds  is shot in real locations. There are no stars, unless you count Regina King and Gretchen Mol (who appears in a small role as an attorney representing the police), and these are actors who are famous mainly for being able to blend in to whatever woodwork happens to surround them. The shock of seeing so many plausibly real-seeming people wandering through real settings amplifies emotions that would’ve been wrenching even if they’d been expressed in a glossy, Hollywood manner.

King, in particular, is staggeringly powerful here, portraying a woman whose faith in God, her marriage, and her family are all upended by the loss of her son. The scene where she chastises her minister and rejects his faith is so raw that you feel as if you shouldn’t be watching it. “I was in a church singing His praises when my son was in a ditch,” she says. “I’m done praying to a God who answers a murderer over a mother.” Nearly as impressive, and sneakily so, is Knapp as Peter Jablonski, a performance so lived-in that if you’d told me he was a cop who’d never acted before but was cast because he was so comfortable on camera, I might have believed it. He captures the specific torment of a man who was raised in a macho culture and has no language with which to describe his feelings going through an existential crisis. Peter plainly sees what he has to do in order to live with himself, but can’t seem to do it. Knapp never asks us to sympathize with the character, just to see him as a weak, screwed-up, self-serving human being.

Although the story does build to something like catharsis, with shreds of hope, it’s not an “all’s well that ends well” finale, because we’ve seen during the preceding nine hours how broken the system is, and we’ve watched so many of its participants covering their asses because honoring the letter or spirit of the law might take away their comfort. It’s rare to see a story of this type that acknowledges how insular, clubby, and easily corrupted the sad remains of American civic government can be.

The phrase “depraved indifference” shows up during a courtroom scene. The term describes people so lacking in regard for the lives of others that they merit the same punishment as those who intentionally cause harm, and it resonates backward throughout the whole story. The sight of Peter and his wife Marie (Michelle Veintimilla) doting on their newborn child is already sickening because we saw what happened before Peter arrived at the hospital. As  Seven Seconds  goes on, and Marie learns the truth but fails to hold Peter accountable, their scenes become nauseating and ultimately obscene. But Seven Seconds is adamant that while it’s impossible to make a bad situation good, it is possible to make it right, if one is wiling to be honest and accept punishment. It’s only at the very end that we realize that the main story, the prosecution of four men who covered up a teenager’s death, is a distillation of the challenges facing a nation that has gotten way too comfortable with moral, legal, and political failure, and has adopted depraved indifference as way of life.

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I Binge-Watched Seven Seconds on Netflix: My Review

I have a problem with art that imitates life so well, it leaves us with the message that there is no WINNING. It punches you in the gut and reminds you that even when you think you might win, you will lose. And that is my main problem with Seven Seconds , a drama offered up by Netflix , and created by Veena Sud .

TRIGGER WARNING: police brutality and death

When Seven Seconds starts, we see a white dude driving while on the phone. He’s distracted when he hits something and his car spins around a couple of time and finally stops. When he gets out his SUV, he sees spinning bicycle wheels under his tire. He didn’t hit something; he hit someone. He looks around and his truck’s guard is half off and bloody. He looks a few feet ahead and sees blood leading to a ditch. What does he do? Surely, calling 911 would be too much like right. He calls a buddy who shows up with 2 others and we see they’re all cops. His superior (Mike DiAngelo) walks to the ditch and looks down. There’s a body there. DiAngelo tells him to drive off, because they cannot let it out that a white cop has killed a Black boy. Especially not in this age of Ferguson.

Shaken up by the magnitude of what he just did, Petey Jablonski drives off, leaving the 3 officers behind to handle the rest. They “handle” it by leaving the scene, as if nothing happened.

And that’s in the first 10 minutes of the show. Later on in the day, a dog finds the body in the ditch, and that is when the story really starts. We find out the person that Officer Jablonski hit is a 15 year old Black teenager named Brenton Butler. His parents Isaiah and Latrice have to pick up the pieces, and an assistant prosecutor (KJ Harper) is assigned the case. KJ is a Black woman who is overworked, messy AF in her personal life and a barely functioning alcoholic. Her partner on the case is a gum-loving, jokester white dude detective who goes by “Fish.”

The show spends 10 episodes (each an hour) getting KJ and Fish caught up on what we already know. They start connecting the dots of what happened, who did it and why Brenton was left for dead. With the help of Latrice Butler’s compulsion to find justice for her son, the case starts to come together, but it is no easy feat.

Seven Seconds is definitely timely in the theme of police brutality and our assertion of “ BLACK LIVES MATTER ” even as the justice system tells us otherwise. The show is gripping. I was drawn in before the first 15 minutes and was invested in what would happen. These fucked up cops, the innocent Black boy victim and the parents whose lives are torn apart with grief. I was IN and over 3 days, I binged all 10 hours because I needed to see it through.

Seven Seconds had some character development problems, in my opinion. The character, KJ, in all her shenanigans often came off as a self-saboteur and we were barely given a reason why. I found mysef screaming at the screen at her behavior often. Although I had to root for her, it felt like she was just set up to fail. Also, HER HAIR. What the hell was that? It was a limp wig with terrible bangs and a thin ponytail. I never got over how bad it was, as I watched the show. It was almost offensive, how bad it was. Anyway…

The highlight for me was Regina King’s portrayal of Latrice Butler. It felt so real how she vacillated between crippling grief and blinding rage, as a mother who needed answers for why her son Brenton’s life was cut short. The event, which took about 7 seconds, changed her life and seeing how she wanted to jump out her skin from the pain was heartwrenching. I think it was an award-winning performance. Regina King is a quiet force.

HERE IS WHERE REAL SPOILERS START. IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED IT AND WANT TO, TURN BACK NOWWWWWWW.

OK YOU GONE? Lemme finish.

I usually like to finish things I start, and up to episode 6 or 7, I was excited to keep watching. And then something happened once the show got into the courtroom. KJ and Fish finally got to the point where they found out the cop who hit Brenton, and the 3 others who helped cover it up. This is where it gets painful to watch because it’s the part that got TOO real.

In the end, the 3 others get off and Jablonski is sentenced to less than a year behind bars. For killing a Black boy, leaving the scene and hiding evidence.

I was pissed. PISSED. Not because this is unexpected but because this is how it would have played out in real life and I don’t think we needed to see that. What did Seven Seconds want us to feel? Because I don’t think it accomplished anything but to remind us that life sucks, Black lives don’t matter to the state and there’s no winning for us.

It felt gratuitous, and somehow exploitative to be put through that. Even in fiction, ain’t no win for us. There wasn’t justice for Brenton. Just like there hasn’t been justice for Trayvon. Alton. Rakia. Sandra. Eric.

That is why I wouldn’t recommend anyone who is Black watch it. Not because the show wasn’t good, but because it is triggering AF. I audibly said “whew” so many times during the drama that I had to take a few deep breaths.

This is the same problem I had with Poussey’s death on season 4 of Orange is the New Black . It’s the reason I am really thankful that Get Out didn’t use their alternate ending where Chris ended up in jail. Then I realize that MAYBE, just MAYBE, the difference is that a Black man ( Jordan Peele ) knew that he didn’t need to use his film to break our hearts further. Meanwhile, Jenji Kohan and Veena Sud are creators who can write these stories of tragedy from the detached space they occupy as non-members of the groups whose heart they can break over and over again with their stories that lack triumph for Black people.

Nothing good happened in this show. The marriage of the Butlers fell apart too, on top of all that. TEW. MUCH.

Jenji is a Jewish woman and Veena was born to parents of Filipino and Indian heritage. They can write these and stomach the tragedy porn because they aren’t TRULY connected to the pain of what they’re creating. They can write sympathetic storylines for the white cops who take Black lives, and spend time showing “both sides.” I feel like it’s callous because what we need less of is finding out how the Pete Jablonskis became monsters. What we need more of is finding out how the Latrice Butlers triumph over their tragedies.

In a world where we just found out that Alton Sterling’s murderer will not even be charged, I didn’t need “Seven Seconds” to proverbially punch me in the face. I did not. And I ask WHAT WAS THE POINT? To rub the reality of our lives in our faces? Because well done. Mission accomplished.

Maybe I’m just hypersensitive right now but I need more art that challenges me but doesn’t make me feel like everything hopeless. Ultimately, the hopelessness is what made Seven Seconds lousy, to me.

It is time to write that book. Come into The Book Academy and learn how to go from IDEA to INK .

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Opening closed doors (with vanessa k. de luca) - episode 3 of rants & randomness, not even me can stop me (with jenifer lewis) - episode 4 of rants & randomness, 41 comments.

This is why I didn’t watch it. I knew it would be too real. I don’t need to see us lose as entertainment. I see that on the daily. ????

Absolutely! I can NOT! It’s too much ????.

I’m on ep. 3 and the only reason I want to continue is because: Regina King. Her portrayal of the intense emotional rollercoaster which comes with gut wrenching grief is realer than reality tv. But like others said this ain’t no ‘feel good sries’

I really loved the show but I cannot sit through it again. I was definitely triggered the whole time and it took me a lil while to get over it lol

I feel exactly as you Luvvie. Family members who are watching it asked if I was watching. NOPE. I got enough sad ish in my life don’t need to heap on the fictional woes.

As painful as it was to watch, we need constant reminders of our reality so we don’t loosen our grip on change. As hard as it was to see the white cop get off for taking yet another young Black man’s life, I will continue to watch so I will never get comfortable. Don’t be mad at the truth; create a new one.

I understand and complete respect the need to stay focused on our grip and not getting comfortable. -Here is comes- BUT if we can’t relax and enjoy a dramatized, scripted series what’s the point in watching. We should be assembling the next march or designing more signs for that march. Why sit at home and get reminded of the injustice in the world, we could be out there in the fight. NO we need a break from the reality and show a different kind of life for the black community. If we saw it more maybe we would start to believe it is possible.

I LITERALLY slammed a stack of books down onto my living room floor end of last episode. I hated the cops, I hated the wives, hated the defense attorney. It was like rubbing salt and then sprinkling lemon on a fresh wound. Regina saves the day as always but I was praying for a better ending.

This was actually filmed in my neighborhood right outside my building and I saw some of the scenes being filmed. I was excited to watch the series when I heard it was finally going to premier. But while watching and especially after completing it, I was disappointed in the ending. It left me feeling empty after all of the buildup.

I had trouble watching Chi for the same reason – it’s too real and too sad; creates feelings. Don’t we do anything happy?? Sigh.

There is a part of me that wonders if more series and movies are telling the “way too much truth” so that ‘other’ folks can see what’s real. Seems like everything is about them and their comfort. And most films/tv are all about letting them believe in a happy ending. So perhaps this is a small way of making them confront the reality of our lives (or loss of lives)?

I don’t know. And it hurts to even think about watching. Still, I think we can all agree on two things: 1) Regina King is THE QUEEN; and, 2) We are grateful that Luvvie wrote this!!!! :o)

I haven’t seen it but I hope that this is exactly what the take away is. Let the cold truth we are constantly slapped with touch those who fix their mouths to say “it’s not as bad as you say/think/feel it is”.

Thank you for your service, Luvvie. I didn’t think this was for me and you just proved it. I’d only watch this if I was an actress or the like, studying Regina King’s performance.

You didn’t like it? I loved it! One of the things I liked the most was how real it felt. Yes, it sucked to watch that. I too had moments when I wanted to throw something at my tv. (Which I promptly calmed my happy ass down cuz I wasn’t about to mess up my flat screen) It was a reminder that my life truly has very little value in the eyes of America. And like you said, that’s not news. BUT it was Nina Simone that said “an artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times.” I think this woman, even not being black, did that. She showed you exactly what happens in today’s America! No fantasy, no bullshit, no mincing of words or ideas….just the ugly face of justice system as it relates to the police and African Americans. My favorite part was how the influence of religion in the black household was examined. Having grown up in the south, with a mother that had me in church at least 3 days a week, ALL WHILE being black and GAY, I identified a lot with the show. I loved how the director showed how tragedy can effect faith. How it brings some closer to god and pushes others away. I LOVED LOVED LOVED Regina King! She was OUTSTANDING!! I had my problems with the series too….that wig miss KJ had on was just down right disrespectful! Come on now! In the era of Cynthia Bailey, and Nicki Minaj, and RUPAUL….they couldn’t find mother some better hair? And it took too long for them to give us her story! Like I knew she was sleeping with ol boy when she showed up to his house and the wifey wasn’t feeling it but some earlier insight into her drinking would have been nice. But overall, I truly liked it. At the end of the day, art should make you feel. I think this series did its job.

I liked it…It was too real, ugly…But that is art…Wish the ending could have been different…Had a fit about that wig KJ worn too…I kept staring at it, wondering why her hair couldn’t look better…Regina can act her behind off…and to a certain extent, even agree with Luvvie…We need more stories with happy endings.

Yes Luvvie! I watched all 10 episodes & would have been perfectly happy if they had ended at episode 6 when the cops got arrested. It was 4 episodes too long. This is why I haven’t watched Frutvale Station or 12 Years a Slave because I just can’t take heartbreak for entertainment. And about that wig….it was SO DAMN DISTRACTING!!!! I kept thinking there was some deeply hidden secret up under there that would eventually be revealed along with more of KJ’s back story. And as good as Regina King is in it, I fear she is getting typed into the suffering black mother role (American Crime) which I would hate to have stifle her abilities. Naw. I’m too old for this kinda real as entertainment.

I watched it. A couple of times I had to turn it off to deep breath and remember this was from someone’s imagination. As stated by Luvvie, still TOO REAL. i watched until the end in hopes that this would be a grandioso ending of what we hope for in real life. All officers sentenced justly and the wives prosecuted for helping hide what they knew. Butttttt, Nope. Not what we got. What we did get, i was hoping that the writers were hoping to tug a some wipipo heart strings and make them see what damage is done after these types of incidents occur. That hopefully one of these viewers would end up on a jury and be a voice of reason that says NO! This can’t happen again under my watch. Cause a hung jury, make the other jurors think “if we were black” I doubt any of that was done but in my little Libra heart, me hoping for all to be fair at some point. That is what I hope it was meant for.

Excellent review and it was gut wrenching to go through the whole series. You are so right about the creators/directors and the implications of not being African-American.

It was so heart wrenching that I cried. This was too real. The wig, the wig and the wig..WTH

I knew something was not going to be right about this one and I’m glad I didn’t watch it. I wonder (again, didn’t watch) if the equation of “oops, I was careless and killed a Black child” and cops killing Black boys (and girls and men and women…) bothered people too. If this is supposed to be an allegory for real life, how are those the same? Are the IRL cops just careless? Just took their eyes off the morality road for a second? That doesn’t sound right, right there.

It was a good show. Regina King was incredible but at the end all I could think was, I could have just watched the news. I was left with the same empty and hopeless feeling. Maybe the movie wasn’t made for black people. Maybe the hope was to get others to understand our plight.

Luvvie I feel like KJ is the way she is b cause of her relationship with her uppity, self-absorbed Dad. He looks down on her and has pressured her to “be like him.” I left feeling like she tried to drink his disappointment away. Oh and I thought about Erika Alexander the actress the whole time.

I have followed and stalked you on all social media for a few years now. (Began with Scandal). This review right here is so on point. I have not watched and couldn’t bring myself to watch because of how it’s so true and my rage us soooo “whew”. Thank YOU Luvvie for this heartbreaking true review.

Why didn’t KJ introduce Jablonski’s cell phone records that would’ve proved the other cops involvement? Other than that I felt Verna Sud just wanted to create a tragic finale even though there was enough evidence at least in a Northeastern state to produce guilty verdicts. Just as in the Killing she can not finish

Yes! I 100% agree. KJ’s storyline seemed like an afterthought. The cop who always wore a fitted was a trash version of white ppl’s perception of urban blacks. The PR cop was an ultimate trader to The People. The storyline dragged on unnecessarily for Brenton’s family not to come out on top. There should have been some black/brown people with a seat at the Seven Seconds table.

I see your point and I disagree. Our stories are real and need to be told. Fairy tale endings where positive results are rarely achieved are already present in the lexicon. Although, difficult to watch I felt authenticity every moment (even rarer). From not-quite-right hair to not enough character development, I was drawn in.

I didn’t it like for those same reasons. Then people wonder why Black Panther was such a huge success. It’s because when you are constantly depicted in film as being helpless and powerless then to witness yourself being depicted as kings and queens with power, that speaks to the soul of a person. It’s like living in a house where you constantly told your stupid, then your parents make a movie about how stupid you are. Really, was that necessary? How does that help? Educate me because the reality of whats going in the world is enough drama for me.

“It’s because when you are constantly depicted in film as being helpless and powerless then to witness yourself being depicted as kings and queens with power, that speaks to the soul of a person.”

Oh Luvvie, you took the thoughts right out of my head. The difference is I saw where it was going and had to stop. I simply can’t take the trauma of seeing in my fictional entertainment what I have to live in real life. You are much braver than I, and I sooooo appreciate this review… I’d been vacillating on whether or not I should finish watching, but now I know I don’t have to – and don’t WANT to. (And YASSSSSS on that wig!!! I mean, WTH?!?!?)

I’m ok w the wig bc I think it fit in w her hot mess character/alcoholic. I’m gutted by this show.

The part that had me the MOST pissed was when she lost the racial bias argument. When the white female lawyer RIPPED her argument to shreds. I mean, did it have to be that brutal?! I threw a shoe at the TV.

And don’t get me STARTED about the fact that the star defense attorney was a WHITE WOMAN. Not only do you wanna slap us in the face, but you’re pitting two women against each other AND the white lady wins?

Bruh. Get off my Netflix.

RIGHT!!! RIGHT.

Very on point. I expected the outcome, so I had to stop myself from exhaling and saying whew! and/or from getting excited about little victories. I would have been insulted if the cops had gotten their just dues because it would have turned this series into a fairy tale.

I enjoyed this show up until the trial. It became clear to me at the end that this was about sensationalism and exploitation for ratings. How else do the directors explain the decision to portray a black female prosecutor as so incompetent? Because that is why the case was lost; she had good intentions but could not execute. Let’s go down the list: (1) Screwing your married boss instead of working on trial strategy; (2) Not demanding your boo give you experienced co-counsel (nobody in the real world tries big cases like this solo); (3) Not demanding that your boo keep your star witness under lock and key and with an escort when you know she’s prone to run away to get a fix and the bad cops have been after her; (4) Not thoroughly reviewing your evidence to see the missing grill (cause you were busy with your boo and getting beat down by his wife or getting wasted cause you got played); (5) Falling into that ridiculous trap with the dummy and giving the jury a clear visual of your extremely weak race theory; (6) Not excluding testifying witnesses from the courtroom (why were the cops there the entire time); (7) Calling Pete’s no-good daddy as a witness (seriously who would rely on that scumbag); (8) Failing to actually take a written statement under oath from a defendant who wants to confess (you never know what the hell he’ll say on the stand, as you sadly discovered the hard way); (9) Telling Brenton’s father the defendant is going to testify against his boys (did she seriously think he wouldn’t say something); (10) Losing your $hit while questioning the defendant to the point where you are forcibly removed from the courtroom in handcuffs in front of the jury and still did not get the tea you need from the witness (cell phone records girl!!!)…etc., etc.,

We (the audience) knew the full story of the dirty cops, their wives and the cover-up so the verdict stabbed us in the heart. The judge and jury had no clue. The judge simply saw a prosecutor with a bad reputation who was always drunk and poorly prepared so she wasn’t taken seriously at all. The jury saw an unprofessional black woman who could not keep her cool and was outwitted at every turn by her opponent. I wouldn’t have believed KJ’s case either!

One of the proudest moments of my life was as a young lawyer in a majority law firm when the OJ verdict was announced. Everybody was shocked. I ran to my office and called my girl and we both talked about how that Johnnie Cochran was amazing!!! I learned then the importance of being a top notch lawyer and I see sistas doing that everyday.

By making KJ such a screw-up, the whole point of the movie (the flawed justice system) is lost. It made for a good story (they assumed) but she (and our cause) once again became the joke. As usual, we were playing checkers while everyone else was playing chess. I love Regina King but not even she could make me sit through this fiasco again.

Next time the directors should talk to Shonda about portraying black women lawyers who may be flawed personally but know how to handle their business professionally. That was an embarrassment to me and my girls who bring it day in and day out to give us a fighting chance! Directors, do better next time when you attempt to tell our story.

Such a good point this: “By making KJ such a screw-up, the whole point of the movie (the flawed justice system) is lost. It made for a good story (they assumed) but she (and our cause) once again became the joke. As usual, we were playing checkers while everyone else was playing chess. I love Regina King but not even she could make me sit through this fiasco again.”

“By making KJ such a screw-up, the whole point of the movie (the flawed justice system) is lost. It made for a good story (they assumed) but she (and our cause) once again became the joke. ”

GREAT POINT!

We really not gon’ talk about KJ’s basic AF sears suit and t-shirt tho? Was I really the only one that noticed?

Regina King and Russell Hornsby are the only reasons to watch.

The show gutted me too but the last few minutes have me hope. It started during all that verdict ish at the end was when KJ gave her last stand (I was straight weeping from here on out). Then when the entire right side of the courtroom didn’t stand up for the judge. And then when she walked out of the courtroom, and they all stood for her. It showed me the redemption in her character. And I literally threw my fist in the air and yelled, “Fight fight fight fight!!!” Because what can we do but keep fighting until they hear us. Fight until they see us. It’ll take time and sometimes looks fruitless but they deserve it. They are worth us fighting for. Even when we’re deeply flawed and broken, we gotta do all we can to fight for them. Fight. On.

A whole lot of people have to say “Yes” for this to have reached @Luvvie ‘s eyeballs in the first place. I always wonder when storytelling is problematic, “Who agreed to pay for this? What is the story you think you are telling? Why do you think this is the way to tell the story? Who is the intended audience? What response is the storyteller hoping for, best case, from the audience?” I just can’t imagine the people who said “Yes” to all the choices Luvvie decries would have Luvvie-approved answers to those questions.

I binge-watched the season Friday and Saturday, all the while hoping that the black community and family would get justice. It really SUCKS that the black stories in these types of shows have to stay so tight in reality and white stories portrayed in everything else seem to get their problem or problems resolved and are allowed live happily ever after… We can’t catch a break even in fake stories about fake crimes and crooked cops that really desired to get killed or at the very least put in jail. The one that did go to jail gets 30 days, SERIOUSLY! It’s the continuous production of shows like “Seven Seconds” that made “Black Panther” a billion dollar movie. Entertaining to all – black, white or purple and for a few hours as a black viewer -WE WIN PROUD AND WITH HONOR! Why Hollywood can’t seem to understand we need that more than seeing life with unfair odds over and over again… Sorry, I will not be watching season 2. I want to be entertained, not reminded.

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‘Seven Seconds’: Regina King’s Brilliant Netflix Drama Is Canceled, But Still Worthy of an Emmy

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The central image in Netflix series “ Seven Seconds ” is striking, iconic and, for showrunner Veena Sud, intimately familiar: the Statue of Liberty, with her back to New Jersey, stands in front of the Manhattan shoreline. Sud saw it every day as a single mom taking her son to the park in Jersey City’s Filippino neighborhood.

“Seven Seconds” is not only a worthy successor to Sud’s Seattle mystery procedural “The Killing,” which Netflix rescued when AMC let it go, but to David Simon’s influential “The Wire,” which explored the inner workings of Baltimore institutions. She only got one season to do it, which is why Netflix put “Seven Seconds” into Emmy contention as a Limited Series. (The category is weaker than usual this year, as opposed to the overcrowded Drama Series.) In television, getting canceled is a harsher reality than not getting continued or extended; it’s a rejection, and Emmy nominations tend to come with a perception of ongoing success, not rejection.

Nonetheless, “Seven Seconds” deserves credit as one of the best-written, -directed, and -acted series of the year.  Was it ever likely to be one of the most popular? No. But Netflix was willing to take on Sud’s searing portrait of a community in which a teenage African-American boy is run off the road by a white cop (Beau Knapp) who leaves him to die in the snow in a pool of his own blood. The cop allows his fellow cops to cover up for him as a determined investigator (Michael Mosley) and assistant district attorney (British discovery Clare-Hope Ashitey) press closer to finding what actually happened.

“Netflix is open to dramas that don’t make things so easy,” said Sud. “It would have been very hard to set up at another network, if not impossible. Yes, I did get that feedback about how dark the show was when pitching. Other shows nail antlers to the corpses of women’s heads. That’s dark too.”

Sud adapted “Seven Seconds” from Yuriy Bykov’s “The Major,” a Russian action film about a man who hits a kid on the road, setting it in Jersey City with a Black Lives Matter storyline. “I was turning on the television and seeing on a nightly basis another shooting by a police officer by another black man — Michael Brown, Freddy Gray, Tamar Rice — ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I wanted to tell a story of police violence. I wanted not to pull any punches, to be as truthful as I can. And it was important for the story not to create false happy endings.”

The lead role, inspired by Paul Newman in “The Verdict” — a young lawyer who masks her stress with alcohol — was a bitch to cast, as it had been with “The Killing,” when Mireille Enos came in to read for the detective lead with the pilot director Patty Jenkins at the last moment. This time, with pilot director Gavin O’Connor in prep, after scores of tapes and auditions, Sud was watching “Children of Men” on TV and saw a young actress who said “fuck off” to Clive Owen. “Who is this woman?” she asked. “I needed a fighter, a woman who could show deep vulnerability and fragility and brokenness and be able to go all the way to the end of the spectrum and fight like hell.”

Ashitey pushes her troubled lawyer to the limits of likability. “I like flawed women,” said Sud. “There has to be a rebalance. There is a superwoman trope, of beauty and guts and she has it all, with her fucking hair done perfectly, she’s a good mom. She becomes a prison for us. It’s boring as shit. It makes me feel like shit about myself. In the same way Bryan Cranston and Tony Soprano got to be bad, I want women who are not that Madonna superhero beauty. I want women who act like me.”

At the center of “Seven Seconds” are the boy’s two grieving parents ( Regina King and Russell Hornsby). Always in demand, “American Crime” Emmy-winner King wanted to take on the powerhouse role of the assistant D.A., but Sud was stubborn. “I wanted Regina to play the mom because Latrice Butler and her husband are the emotional access to the story, the crux of being able to get into and understand the cost of a child’s life. We needed to understand that through the family; we needed actors who were at the top of their game. Regina and Russell are gifted and would not hold back.”

That’s what King was afraid of, she said in a phone interview. “Because I do have a son. Veena Sud saw me as Latrice. As I look back on it, the thought of that being an experience was scary. I felt, ‘How am I going to honor or pay respect to parents who have children who have been murdered at the hands of someone else?’ For a parent to lose a child is devastating in itself, but to lose a child by murder is worse.”

Working with Sud, who is Filippino-Indian, was helpful to King, she said: “Just being a woman of color in America, because of our history, the conversations she and I can have and understand from a emotional place I wouldn’t have had.”

For her writers room, Sud usually hires about eight people with a majority people of color. “My writers rooms always have women, by choice, by design,” she said. “I look for the best writers who are capable of writing the female and male leads. Some of the best voices for Fish, the white guy from Jersey, were black and Latina.”

And she also fights for as many women directors as she can. “I find there’s still resistance, as we all know, to female directors,” she said. “It remains a big problem.”

Raised in Cincinnati, Sud studied directing at NYU, moved into working on “The Real World,” wrote a spec script for “Oz” that landed her into the Disney Writing Fellowship, and joined the “Cold Case” writers room before being promoted to showrunner. “With series television, I love how long characters get to live, how many journeys they get to go through, just the ensemble nature of it.” She describes showrunning as “three rivers constantly running into the same channel: I’m writing and prepping episodes to go into production and post starts the minute the first dailies come in. When all three things are happening, I don’t get a lot of sleep or see my family much.”

She always had ambitions for “Seven Seconds” continuing to unfold like “The Wire,” “as a portrait of a city, as a reflection of the country,” she said, “using the microcosm of Jersey City as a way to play out different hot button issues that are striking our hearts.” So she is disappointed that it won’t happen.

Next up: She’s stepped away from the television village to direct a movie, “Between Earth and Sky,” a psychological thriller due this fall for Blumhouse starring Enos and Peter Sarsgaard.

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Seven Seconds

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Watch Seven Seconds with a subscription on Netflix.

Cast & Crew

Regina King

Latrice Butler

Clare-Hope Ashitey

Russell Hornsby

Isaiah Butler

Peter Jablonski

Michael Mosley

Joe "Fish" Rinaldi

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How Systemic, Real-Life Violence Inspired Netflix’s Latest Crime Drama

Instances of police brutality, particularly against men and women of color , are unfortunately a recurring event in America. Social media is littered with hashtags created in a memory of slain children and adults who many believe never received the justice they deserved. And on Feb. 23, Netflix’s new crime-thriller, anthology series Seven Seconds (executive producer: Veena Sud) will pull straight from the headlines — many headlines. Although Season 1 isn’t based on one particular real incident, creator Veena Sud drew inspiration from numerous real-life cases to create the series.

According to production notes provided by Netflix, Sud was especially moved by the death of Tamir Rice, who was only 12 in November 2014 when he was shot by a Cleveland police officer after he mistook Rice's toy gun for a real weapon, per The New York Times . No charges were be brought against either the officer who fired his weapon or his partner, who was also on the scene. Additionally, the cases involving Trayvon Martin , Michael Brown and Freddie Gray — all black men and reportedly unarmed at the time of their deaths — really stuck with Sud.

“I was inspired to write Seven Seconds after turning on the news every night, watching in horror all the seemingly endless stories of police violence,” Sud said in a press release for the series. “There were so many questions, and I needed to understand the story behind the headlines. How does something as systematic as this happen, over and over and over? That was the real heart of Seven Seconds . What I saw on TV, in front of my eyes, made telling this story crucial and necessary.”

In Seven Seconds , the main character’s name – Brenton – was also inspired by a real-life victim of a flawed justice system. As reported in a 2000 article in The Guardian , a Florida teen named Brenton Butler was arrested while on his way to submit a job application to a local Blockbuster video store. He was charged with robbery and murder related to a shooting death at a motel. Butler testified that the police coerced a confession out of him using physical abuse, which formed the basis of the prosecution's argument. The teen was eventually acquitted of all charges, and both State Attorney Harry Shorstein and Jacksonville Sheriff Nat Glover admitted that the arrest and charge were wrongful , per News4Jax.

"His name was inspired by the real Brenton Butler because his story was so intensely heart wrenching and illuminated the travesties of the justice system criminalizing innocent young Black men,” Sud said in a statement provided to Bustle by Netflix.

Seven Seconds tackles the controversial issues of race relations between law enforcement and the people they serve in this New Jersey-set series. In an instant life is forever changed when 15-year-old Brenton is run over in Liberty State Park by a white police officer, who flees from the scene after his fellow officers arrive. Brenton lies in a pool of blood in the park the middle of February for 12 hours before being found. And while Brenton’s family and the unlikely duo that is Prosecutor K.J. Harper (Ckare-Hope Ashitey) and Joe “Fish” Rinaldi (Michael Mosley) search for answers, the officers responsible for the cover-up attempt to keep their secret under wraps.

“The only kind of story I wanted to tell about police violence in American would have to be no-holds-barred,” Sud said in the release. “It had to be a thoughtful examination of the issue, open to the truth of the racial history of this country, and honest about the brokenness of the criminal justice system. Nothing easy or feel good or simplistic.”

The series is also loosely based on a Russian movie, The Major , which depicts an incident involving a police officer offer who accidentally hits a teen with his car while frantically driving to the hospital for his child’s birth, according to Den of Geek. Similar to what happens in Seven Seconds , the accident subsequently leads to a cover-up by the cops’ colleagues.

Fortunately, Seven Seconds holds true to Sud’s promise on holding nothing back. Focusing not just on the harrowing crime at hand, the series also hones in on the aftermath of the tragedy and the devastating toll it takes on everyone involved. And while the characters might be fictional, the things they go through are very much real.

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Seven Seconds

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Tensions run high between black citizens and white cops in Jersey City when a black teenage boy is critically injured by a cop. Tensions run high between black citizens and white cops in Jersey City when a black teenage boy is critically injured by a cop. Tensions run high between black citizens and white cops in Jersey City when a black teenage boy is critically injured by a cop.

• Clare-Hope Ashitey
• Michael Mosley
• 297 User reviews
• 17 Critic reviews
• 8 wins & 12 nominations total

Episodes 10

Top cast 99+

• Peter Jablonski

• Joe 'Fish' Rinaldi

• Mike DiAngelo

• Isaiah Butler

• Felix Osorio

• Manny Wilcox

• Seth Butler

• Marie Jablonski

• Latrice Butler

• James Connelly

• Kadeuce Porter

• Vontrell 'Messiah' Odoms

• Crystal DiAngelo
• Brenton Butler

• Sam Hennessy
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• Trivia According to series creator Veena Sud , the choice of the particular New Jersey location was intentional because the rear view of the Statue of Liberty was somewhat symbolic of how welcoming 'she' is to immigrants from Europe and the East, and how ironic it is that her back is turned to those already settled here, particularly those in dire need of justice in this storyline.
• Connections Featured in The 70th Primetime Emmy Awards (2018)

User reviews 297

• Apr 19, 2018
• How many seasons does Seven Seconds have? Powered by Alexa
• February 23, 2018 (United States)
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On Netflix: February 23, 2018

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