Seven Seconds Is a Crime Drama Built for 2018

This post contains spoilers for Netflix’s Seven Seconds.

Seven Seconds is a hell of a downer. There’s no getting around it: the Jersey City-set series, which premiered on Netflix Friday, starts when a young black boy is accidentally slaughtered by a distracted police officer, who runs him over while rushing to see the birth of his first child. After the rookie cop calls some of his fellow police officers, including his supervisor, things only get worse. They decide to cover up the incident, motivated by the belief that people will rush to conclusions the moment they find out a white cop killed a black kid.

This isn’t a whodunit, as viewers witness the incident in the very beginning of the series; nor is it a “whydunit,” as the USA Network recently described its summer series The Sinner, as every character’s motivations are made abundantly clear. Instead, the series asks bigger, thornier questions, focusing primarily on how a nation can be so perpetually indifferent to the death of black children.

From the first episode, Seven Seconds makes clear that it’s interested in being more than a ripped-from-headlines crime story. Its characters, though familiar, are vividly rendered and impeccably acted—especially grieving mother Latrice Butler, played by Regina King, and Clare-Hope Ashitey’s K.J. Harper, the prosecutor tasked with seeking justice for Brenton Butler. When Ashitey first got the pilot script, it was the characters in particular that caught her eye.

“You couldn’t pin them down,” Ashitey tells V.F., “and I always think that’s really wonderful in a script when that happens, because it’s so true to actual life. Rather than having it set up and being told, here’s your hero, and here’s your villain, and here’s your this and here’s your that, it was just: a situation occurs, and here are these people, and here’s how they deal with it.”

K.J. Harper, for instance, is both a highly competent prosecutor and someone prone to self sabotage. Throughout the series’ ten episodes, Ashitey balances Harper’s determination with her fragility. K.J. is undeniably intelligent, but her spirit is fragile, and when it is broken—understandably, given how cases like the one this series examines tend to go—her alcoholism becomes especially destructive. To Ashitey, that dynamic—feeling dwarfed by a seemingly insurmountable challenge—is one everyone can relate to, in their own way. “We watch her continually meet those barriers,” Ashitey says, “and sometimes she meets them head on and gets over them. Sometimes she’s dragged over them by someone else. And sometimes, she tries to run away from them. I think that’s what happens to all of us.”

Seven Seconds is certainly not the first crime drama to tackle the issue of racism in law enforcement, but getting the story right was still paramount to its cast and creative team. As Ashitey notes, “This isn’t ancient history that we’re telling. We’re telling stories that affect the lives of people every day, and affect the lives of people right now and how they were yesterday, and as they are today and as they will be tomorrow.” Telling the story wrong, Ashitey said, would do a disservice to real people’s lives and also undercut its message. Within that context, the duality of each character becomes more important.

The accidental killer, Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp), is clearly a guy who never imagined he would have responded to the accident the way he does—but the reality is, he did leave a dying black boy in a ditch. The series investigates how Peter and everyone around him are able to turn a blind eye to what he did, a question with bigger implications: as K.J. puts it in her closing argument, “We have a problem. And our country has a problem. Our children are dying in plain sight—left like roadkill on our playgrounds, our streets, and our sidewalks. Turn on the news. Open a paper and read their names. Each is a clear message to every black woman, man, and child. That our lives and our bodies have no value. So how many names are enough before we, before you, say ‘enough?’ ”

Peter, his friends, and his family are certainly not the good guys in this story, or even good people more generally. But the villain of Seven Seconds is bigger than them. It’s apathy. It’s a criminal justice system that routinely fails the population it is meant to protect and serve—and a country full of people who, so far, have failed to do anything about that. Now, especially, as teenagers effectively rally for change on another horrifying issue that seemed destined to always fade from national consciousness, Seven Seconds lands as a similarly prescient indictment of inaction. As those high school students from Parkland refuse to quit, the show serves as another reminder that complacency can be the most destructive force of all.

To really tell that story, Ashitey says, characters cannot fall into archetypal buckets like “heroes” and “villains.”

“Sometimes it’s great when, you know, you’re sitting down to watch a straightforward story and you know how it’s going to go, and you know how it’s going to end,” she explains. Still, she adds, “That’s a fairytale. . . . We all are just people, and something happens, and we make a decision as a result when something happens, and it could be a poor choice or a good choice, or anywhere in between. But we make that decision in the moment and we live with the consequences.”

Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Laura BradleyLaura Bradley is a Hollywood writer for VanityFair.com. She was formerly an editorial assistant at Slate and lives in Brooklyn.