After her success with the three-season US adaptation of Danish noir series The Killing, writer and producer Veena Sud has joined the line of television creatives who've moved on to the irresistible lure of Netflix. She joins bigger names such as Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, who are all finding homes at the streaming service.
For her adaptation of The Killing, Sud relocated the action to interminably wet Seattle in winter and for her first Netflix show, Seven Seconds - adapted from a Russian film, The Major - the Canadian-born writer sticks to the noirish atmosphere of winter in the snow and ice of Jersey City.
The show begins with a killing and we know from its first episode who's responsible and how it's attempted to be covered up. Newly recruited narcotics squad officer Peter Jablonski (Beau Knapp) is frantically driving to aid his pregnant wife in hospital when he hits something in the snow.
He gets out of the car, shocked and dazed, only to see the wheel of a bicycle spinning underneath his truck. He calls his squad boss, Mike DiAngelo (David Lyons), who with the rest of the crew rushes over and convinces Jablonski that in the age of Ferguson, Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter, a white cop knocking over a black teenager on a bike is not going to be good for any of them.
That black teen's name is Bernard Butler, and the investigation into his death and the effects on both Jablonski and Butler's religious mother, Latrice (Regina King), become the focus of Sud's slow-burning 10-part show...