Five reasons why you should watch the new HBO series on Sky Atlantic now.

If the Holy Grail of US literature is the Great American Novel, HBO may have hit the jackpot with the Great American Murder Mystery. Currently airing on Sky Atlantic, after launching on HBO earlier this year, The Night Of is, like the country itself, a mix of local pedigree and foreign influences. Writers Messrs Steven Zaillian and Richard Price (who between them have worked on Schindler’s List, _Gangs Of New York _and The Wire) have tailored the British series Criminal Justice to the trial of Nasir “Naz” Khan, a Pakistani-American student who borrows his father’s cab to drive to a party and is accused of murdering a female passenger. In the year of Mr Donald Trump, Brexit, a failed Turkish coup and the refugee crisis, its portrait of immigrant communities and the Western prejudice they encounter also has a socio-political resonance rarely seen in a TV drama, let alone one as purely thrilling as this. As we wait for episode four to air on Sky Atlantic next Thursday, here are five spoiler-free reasons The Night Of is the most impressive show of 2016 so far.

Gorgeous Scandi visuals have almost become a cliché since series one of The Killing in 2011, but The Night Of’s lyricism never feels gratuitous. Every close-up is a clue and its arthouse patience hums with symbolism: the bridge to the prison on Rikers Island, the “beach”, animals (especially cats and stags), knives and the taxi itself (a claustrophobic barometer of urban life, from Mr Martin Scorsese to Mr Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran). Even the look and light of New York, probably the most filmed city in the world, have a nightmarish novelty, and the final shot of the whole series could be a grim echo of _The Great Gatsby’_s, a kindred fable of thwarted reinvention.

Paced with the forensic eye of real-crime masterworks The Jinx and Making A Murderer, the show is plotted as though the writers themselves don’t know what will happen next. Like Line of Duty, it is accessibly complex and relatably cliché-free. Every scene does something, there is no fat on the script at all. For all their virtues, Serial had a lot of waffle, The People V OJ Simpson flirted too often with soap and True Detective indulged flights of pretension. But The Night Of is taut, ambitious, intellectually precise and emotionally ambiguous. It totally works as a standalone piece, but it also (as the final scenes capture) treads a grim cyclicality.

Mr Riz Ahmed’s exceptional performance as murder suspect Naz catapults him into the leading man A-list. Subversively genial in the film Four Lions, here he shifts his blank face from terrified to terrifying and his descent becomes a slow corruption of a second-gen American dream. As Naz’s dogged lawyer John Stone (a part originally earmarked for Mr James Gandolfini), Coen Brothers muse Mr John Turturro slogs, scratches and soars in his best role since the Palme d’Or-winning Barton Fink (and possibly the most sympathetic of his career) as a psoriatic post-9/11 Atticus Finch. Other standouts are Mr Peyman Mooadi (star of Mr Asghar Farhadi’s extraordinary A Separation and About Elly, both of which The Night Of resembles), The Wire’s hypnotic Mr Michael K Williams as prison kingpin Freddy and Ms Jeannie Berlin as wry prosecutor Helen Weiss.

The characterisation intoxicates, grips and misdirects so satisfyingly that the identity of the killer is almost incidental. Mr Turturro’s wild goose chase for skin remedies mirrors the false breakthroughs of the murder trial, instilling the ideal blend of shame and defiance to empathise with Naz. Soon-to-retire Sergeant Box struggles with life after the police as poignantly as old Brooks post-prison in The Shawshank Redemption. The show could do with a little more focus on female characters (like Naz’ mother or prosecutor Helen), though Ms Amara Karan’s defence lawyer Chandra Kapoor becomes a cautionary tale of loneliness and double standards.

Perhaps the freshest ingredient in the feast is the exploration of the great worries of the age, including (but not limited to) addiction, gangs, racism, immigration, post-9/11 angst, the legal system and even the Kafkaesque frustrations of chronic low-level illness. The show’s largely non-white focus is a vigorous rejoinder to the lack of diversity in the creative arts and it is telling (if unsurprising) that the most acute portraits of modern America tend to have an outsider’s perspective (the holy trinity of Messrs Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth have Italian, Lithuanian-Jewish and Galician-Jewish backgrounds respectively). And like the cinema-fables of Turkish grandmaster Mr Nuri Bilge Ceylan or the Iranian Mr Farhadi, The Night Of is modestly aware of its own brilliance, but never feels too self-important (as man-heavy pieces so often do). In short, all of contemporary American life is here.