The dynamics between the boys’ parents are just as heavy, particularly between Yusef’s mother Sharone (Aunjanue Ellis) and Korey’s mother Delores (a fiery Niecy Nash), who resents what she perceives as Sharone’s selfish tendency to put her son’s needs above everyone else’s. In episode three, when Yusef (played at this point by Chris Chalk) and Antron (Jovan Adepo) run into each other at a mandatory class that’s part of their probation, there’s a built-in comfort level that enables them to joke around, something that would be ordinary for anyone else but is a cathartic act for two people tethered to each other by tragedy. When They See Us even nods directly to the movie: When the kids start racing toward the park, a boom box is blasting “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, the track that famously opens Lee’s film.Īll of the actors portraying the wrongly convicted young men, at early and later stages, inhabit them with a natural ease that makes their fear and indignation even more vivid and, ultimately, bonds them to each other. That may be intentional, since Spike Lee’s masterpiece was also released in 1989, two months after the incident in Central Park. Jerome brings an energy to the performance that’s reminiscent of the quiet righteousness of Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem in Do the Right Thing. Korey is reserved and soft-spoken - he’s embarrassed to admit he has a hard time reading - but he speaks up loudly when he feels he’s been done an injustice.
As a teenage Korey, his eyes go from wide to wider, expressing his default naïveté or shock at what’s happening to and around him. But he also uses his expressions and body language as incredibly persuasive tools. Jerome is blessed with a youthful face that, with added facial hair, can slide easily up and down the age spectrum. Korey is also the only character portrayed from his teen years to adulthood by the same actor: Jharrel Jerome ( Moonlight), who delivers the standout performance in this limited series, which is saying something considering that the cast is filled with excellent actors. Before getting to the case’s dismissal, a majority of the fourth episode focuses on Korey, the only one of the five sentenced as an adult and the one who winds up spending the most time behind bars in places like Rikers Island. Three episodes follow the two trials that ultimately land all five teens in prison for various periods of time, what happens to each of them during and post-incarceration, and, in the end, how their convictions are rendered null and void. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein, played by Felicity Huffman at a time when it’s especially easy to view her as a blinkered woman of white privilege, takes special interest in spinning a narrative that pins the crime on them. When the cops eventually intervene, and the five boys are brought in and questioned (initially with no parents and certainly no attorneys present), When They See Us shows us, again and again, detectives coercing the five into admitting involvement and/or implicating each other in the rape of investment banker Trisha Meili, an attack that occurred on the same night that the fights and other harassment broke out, creating an all-too-convenient circumstance for pointing the finger at these black and Latino boys. When a slew of kids starts running toward Central Park, each of them, one by one, follows the mob, some of whom do start picking fights. But when we meet them in the first episode, they’re just teenagers doing teenagery things on an April night in Harlem.
Those five men are Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise. But this scripted miniseries, which debuts Friday on Netflix, feels more personal due to DuVernay’s intimate approach - she directed and co-wrote all four episodes - and thoughtful performances across the board, especially from the actors who portray the wrongly accused as boys and men. The story of the Central Park Five has certainly been covered extensively by media as well as the 2012 documentary The Central Park Five, co-directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s sensitively wrought Netflix miniseries about what happened to those boys, strips away the dehumanizing tendency to bunch them together and instead shows what each of them dealt with individually when they were coerced into giving false confessions, forced to do time for a crime they did not commit, and, eventually, exonerated when their convictions were vacated in 2002.
Prosecutors and reporters tended to refer to them as a single unit after that: a wolf pack, or as they would ultimately become known, the Central Park Five.
Thirty years ago, five teenagers of color were arrested and charged with raping and beating a white female jogger in Central Park. Jharrel Jerome as Korey Wise in When They See Us.
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