![]() What makes it vital, though, is Jerome’s performance as a kid growing up in front of our eyes, under the most outrageous circumstances. But the fourth, which runs nearly 90 minutes long and portrays 16-year-old Korey’s path into an adult prison and the strange events that led to the entire group’s exoneration, is so enraging and brutal to watch that it almost threatens to lose viewers entirely. The second captures the trial the third, which brings in four older actors to play the characters as adults (Jerome does double duty as Korey), tracks the experiences of Kevin, Antron, Yusef, and Raymond in juvenile detention, and their difficulties adjusting to release. The tremendous dexterity of the five actors cast as the teenagers, and the emotional texture written into the story, makes the first episode heartrending. ![]() Korey stutters earnestly through his own statement, saying, “This is my first … extreme I did to any kind of female.” Kevin is so young at 14 that he visibly panics when the cop interviewing him starts describing sexual acts. It’s simpler to see how coded language and institutional racism might have helped Fairstein persuade pliant NYPD officers to coerce confessions: Where a colleague (played by Famke Janssen) sees “a dozen kids harassing cyclists in the park,” Fairstein sees “animals” and “little thugs.” Even when the boys break, after being questioned for 30 hours without food or sleep, and without any kind of legal representation, their confessions are contradictory, nonsensical, and heartbreakingly naive. It’s hard, given the plain circumstances the series lays out, to comprehend the mental gymnastics employed by the sex-crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein (played here by Felicity Huffman) to reason that five boys being questioned by the police as potential witnesses might be suspects instead. Then there are sirens and the sounds of police scanners and teenagers scattering into the wind, except for the few who happen to be arbitrarily scooped up on the same night a female jogger is raped, brutally beaten, and left for dead. Kevin watches, alarmed, when he sees a guy being beaten up. The group jeers at some passing cyclists, who are irritated by the fact that they’re blocking the path. They follow them in: Antron McCray (Caleel Harris), the “loyal to the soil” Yankees fan Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez), the peacock of the group Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome), who leaves his outraged girlfriend in a fast-food joint to join his friend Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse) and Kevin. One April night in Harlem, five boys see a group of their peers, noisy and exuberant, heading into Central Park. There’s barely time to process the characters before they’re plunged headfirst into a nightmare, a setup that lets viewers experience some of their spiraling confusion. What this means is a miniseries that’s both profoundly rich and extraordinarily hard to watch. This is a work that wants viewers to see these people, and the fullness of their humanity, above everything else. Her motivation, rather, is to delineate five individuals whose identities were erased and rewritten before they’d even had the chance to finish eighth grade. DuVernay, who directed and co-wrote all four episodes, isn’t particularly interested in reinvestigating this case, or even in delving into the circumstances that led up to it. ![]() These are the kinds of societal fault lines and historic outrages that true-crime miniseries typically love to probe. Catchy and dehumanizing, the phrase enabled the boys to become scapegoats not just for a single crime, but also for a whole city’s feverish paranoia. When They See Us, whose four episodes arrive on Netflix this Friday, was originally titled The Central Park Five, a nomenclature that stuck to the five Harlem teenagers arrested in 1989 for the rape and attempted murder of a 28-year-old female jogger. ![]() The next, he’s in the stark blue cold of Central Park, a tiny figure in a red padded coat, running away from a cop who drags Kevin to the ground and knocks him unconscious with a vicious blow to the head. One minute, Kevin Richardson (played by Asante Blackk) is gently placing a blanket over his mother who’s asleep on the couch, the room around him glowing a warm, protective orange. That’s all the time it takes in When They See Us for five kids to tussle with parents over Yankees loyalty, cajole girlfriends into accompanying them to Kennedy Fried Chicken, and tell sisters about their audacious plans to make first trumpet in the school band. Ava DuVernay manages the same feat in fewer than eight minutes. The loss of innocence is a theme that writers can take entire novels to document.
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