Previewing I Am the Night

The Black Dahlia Murder is one of those famous stories that I really do not know that much about because I have never been that much of a fan of the true crime genre. I think I maybe have seen a movie about it, maybe starring Josh Harnett. Maybe not. You will hear a lot about The Black Dahlia when reading about I Am the Night, but really that crime is just tertiary to the plot of the new TNT limited series. the show is more of a character study than trying to figure out who committed the crime.

The show, based on the book One Day She'll Darken, is the story of Fauna Hodel, who on her sixteenth year, learns her mother that raised her is not actually her birth mother. She grew up thinking that her black mother had sex with a white man, but finds her birth certificate and her mother is listed as Caucasian and her father is listed as an unidentified negro. So it is off to Los Angeles to find her birth mother, find out who her father is, and the rest of her family including her grandfather George.

Oh, and George is believed to be a copycat killer of The Black Dahlia murderer, or possibly the actual killer himself by a reporter played by Chris Pine (teaming back up with his Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins who directed multiple episodes and serves as the executive producer). At the time Fauna is learning about her real self, Pine is a disgraced reporter who was successfully sued for definition by George Hodel and has resigned to awkwardly walking on the sand just to take private pictures of celebrates. As his editor tells him, hold stories you can’t tell.

It takes a while for the two leads to cross paths and the first couple episodes suffer for it. That is the problem with how television is made, Pine’s reporter should not even show up in the first episode because this is Fauna’s story, but since he is the recognizable episode who face has to be on the poster to sell the show, he has to be in as many scenes, and possibly more, just to get the show made.

But once the two cross path, the show really hits its stride in the final three episodes. Well until it just ends and you realize that this was not out to solve the case of The Black Dahlia, it was tell the story of Fauna Hodel. And to hammer that point home, at the end of the series, there is the usual where are they now epilogue and the only person we get an update on is Fauna. This will lead people who are not totally emerged in the Black Dahlia case straight to Bing to see what became of George Hodel and the case

I Am the Night airs Mondays at 9:00 on TNT.
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