I Am the Night

This is a fascinating story of revealation: the mystery of an adoption centered on one girl. The TV series is rife with striking elements of romance and detective, chicanery. Acting is enjoyable and the storyline is quite promising. It looks like knowing the roots can be dangerous for truth-seekers, but fascinating for show viewers.

My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library. It is about 5 hours + or - and presented in 6 episodes. We typically watched 2 per night. As is the norm with these mini series a good 2 to 3 hours of programming is stretched to have it fill 6 episodes so it often gets a bit slow. Still it is a very captivating story from the 1960s Los Angeles.

India Eisley is Fauna Hodel, raised by a black mother just outside Las Vegas, she always was told she was a mixed race child. But her mom would never tell her much. After digging around in 1965 at age 15 and finding her birth certificate, she learned that Tamar Hodel was her birth mother and she became determined to find her. All that is pretty factual.

A character was created for dramatic effect, Chris Pine as Jay Singletary, Los Angeles reporter and military veteran of the Korean War. This character suspects Fauna's grandfather, Jefferson Mays as physician George Hodel, in the murder of the Black Dahlia and perhaps other crimes. So the paths of Fauna and Jay eventually get intertwined.

Another departure from truth comes from depicting George Hodel as living in Los Angeles during the 1960s when in fact he had left the country around 1950 after his trial.

Still it is all a very interesting presentation, Fauna did find her mother, in Hawaii, and grew up to have an interesting and productive life, dying only in 2017 at the age of 66.

I watched all seven episodes. And I was getting excited for the ending to reveal some amazing conspiracy. It didn't. It left you sitting there going "huh". So I looked up some things. And guess what? Non of it fit this story at all. Do your self a favor. Don't watch this. I give it a six because for six episodes I was intrigued. It was the final episode that killed the whole thing.

This show just didn't live up to how good it should have been.... Chris Pine. Love him. The lead actress... she started with promise, but I kept wondering when her outer façade would break and we'd begin to see genuine emotion (we never really did). Ultimately, it set up such an eerie, creepy mystery with real world inspiration, old Hollywood setting with awesome costumes and sets... but along the way, it totally lost my interest. I was curious enough to see the ending, so I stuck with the limited series to the end. But it felt like a mediocre show that should have been great.

Series successfully uses actual people and events to craft a story that could easily span a dozen series. Not all of the events happen in the order they did in history, but the writer has skillfully put them together to make a six unit masterpiece. Excellent period piece (sets, cars, buildings) and very well acted.