Seven Seconds

Sud's drama this time is much more self-assured and hops to its feet immediately. It's more engrossing being involved in the suspense rather than guessing what crazy turn might come next, as she's learned from her previous series.

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.

Seven Seconds does keep you in suspense with the expectation that bad things will happen, and they do. Nevertheless, the series is more hopeful than not. To find out just what that means you'll have to watch. I recommend you do.

Seven Seconds can be a bit obvious at times--a shot of blood in the snow with the Statue of Liberty seen off in the distance--but ultimately it settles into a worthwhile character-driven crime thriller.

Ultimately, though, the detailed character portrayals at the heart of Seven Seconds invest us into the Butlers' search for justice, while poignantly illustrating that in the real world, that justice is rare.

If Seven Seconds is sometimes clumsy and slow to start, shifting from legal drama to The Wire and back again, it gears up into something more reflective and more surprising.

Seven Seconds is full of good performances and interesting, rarely fully developed, ideas and it changes forms so frequently that I maintained curiosity through the frequent spaces that dragged.

The legal and political firestorm that ensues is relentlessly grim in a very long and frustrating road to justice, offering meaty roles for Clare-Hope Ashitey as a train-wreck prosecutor, Michael Mosley as her gum-cracking detective with a thing for strays, Russell Hornsby as King's shattered husband and Gretchen Mol as a cunning shark lawyer. [19 Feb - 4 Mar 2018, p.15]

In the end, Seven Seconds is a diverting watch made better by Regina Freaking King and a few powerful scenes scattered amidst an overwritten season.

Seven Seconds, which runs for more than 10 hours that seem like 15, follows the grim and grimy Sud playbook without really saying much of anything new. The fault lies not with its stars, most of whom perform very ably or well beyond that. It’s just that sometimes enough is enough.

For all the story’s shortcomings, you’ll come back for the acting.

Seconds may not be particularly original, but it’s a solid binge for a chilly night in.

What emerges is a solid, overly dense, but occasionally surprising serialized Netflix drama, one that hinges on a police cover-up but which proves to be a bit messy in its incorporation of racial politics.

The series would certainly benefit from some editorial tightening--reducing its number of episodes to five or six would have made it considerably more exciting. As its stands, Seven Seconds is admirably acted, but it’s a slow grind.

Seven Seconds is good at showing its characters’ pain; it’s less effective at giving them a more rounded humanity, as Showtime’s series “The Chi”--also about the aftermath of violence--has done much better. But there’s a purity of dark vision driving the series, if you’re willing to take it without sweetener.

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.

Seven Seconds doesn’t display any more storytelling discipline than “The Killing” did, and Netflix’s habit of indulging overlong episodic running times plagues “Seven Seconds,” which turns into a chore despite a promising start.

The series does make its point, that nothing is fair and the institutions designed to protect us are broken, even if it does so with an extremely heavy hand. It's hard, especially when King is onscreen, not to be reminded of ABC's superior American Crime, which more deftly handled complex social issues and told a better story in the process. If only there was a little more depth behind those Seven Seconds.