Riz Ahmed’s Hit HBO Crime Thriller Series Quietly Returns As American Streaming Success

Riz Ahmed‘s breakout crime thriller has resurfaced as a streaming hit.

Ahmed has had a standout year so far. He stars as the lead of the twisty Prime Video comedy Bait, which uses the search for the next James Bond as a way of exploring the cost of ambition and family friction. He will next be seen alongside Tom Cruise in Digger, another sharp satire from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

But roughly a decade earlier, Ahmed’s breakout role came as part of HBO’s The Night Of. The eight-episode limited series was a more straightforward thriller than the Oscar winner’s recent work in Bait and Digger, centering on a young man who finds himself caught up in an unimaginable crime. It garnered several awards, including an Emmy win for Ahmed, and is now enjoying a resurgence.

According to FlixPatrol, which tracks performance on streaming services and on-demand platforms, The Night Of is currently #8 on Apple TV Store’s Top 10 rankings of television shows. The limited HBO series ranked even higher earlier in the month, coming in at #4. There’s no indication of why The Night Of is trending well at this particular moment.

One reason may be that Ahmed has had a string of acclaimed performances recently. Along with his work in Bait, the 43-year-old actor earned raves for his work in the Aneil Karia-directed Hamlet. In that sense, The Night Of served as an early preview of what the actor was capable of on-screen.

Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet Has One Of The Best Tweaks On The Classic Play I’ve Ever Seen

Aneil Karia’s version of Hamlet starring Riz Ahmed makes a unique tweak on the classic play that fuses two characters in a clever touch.

The first episode of The Night Of, directed by Oscar winner Steven Zaillian, introduced viewers to Ahmed as Nasir Khan. A wild night with Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black-D’Elia) results in Nasir waking up to find that the young woman has been stabbed to death in her bedroom. Nasir has no recollection of what happened and leaves the scene. But he is ultimately implicated in the murder, with a weary lawyer stepping in to defend him.

That weary lawyer, John Stone, is played by John Turturro, who now plays Irv in Apple TV’s Severance. The role was originally planned for The Sopranos star James Gandolfini before his death. It then went to Robert De Niro, who had to exit the project because of scheduling conflicts.

Ahmed is an Oscar winner for the live-action short film The Long Goodbye, shared with Aneil Karia. He also received an Oscar nomination for his lead role in Sound of Metal. He’d long excelled in those kinds of meaty roles, going back to 2010’s political satire film Four Lions from director Chris Morris. But it was really The Night Of that properly introduced Ahmed to a wider audience. Now, it looks to be getting another look.