Seven Seconds

Netflix's Seven Seconds starts as a refreshing treatment of a rapidly aging dramatic premise -- honest folks face off with bad cops and a beleaguered and cynical criminal justice system -- but it turns mawkish in its final hour. It's worth the watch because of Clare-Hope Ashitey's winning performance as Assistant Prosector KJ Harper, a karaoke-loving booze hound who is assigned the case of teenage black boy who was hit by a Jersey City cop and left in a ditch to die. Though at first reluctant, Harper is joined in this Black Lives Matter crusade by NYPD transfer Joe "Fish" Rinaldi (Michael Mosley), a ballsy guy who hates dirty cops more than he hates New Jersey. The series' rogues' gallery of despicable characters includes a trio of undercover detectives who are in bed with a local black gang that is slinging drugs on city corners, an ambitious chief prosecutor who needs the case settled to lock in the black vote for the next election and happens to be Harper's ex-lover, and the dead boy's family, church-going folks who sway between indignation and madness. The final courtroom scene might remind some viewers of To Kill a Mockingbird; I'm sure the scene was meant as an homage but it felt forced and treacly to me.