For those who haven’t seen HBO’s outstanding limited series, ‘The Night Of,’ please be aware — spoilers are ahead.

Rarely have I seen a show that captures the essence of the doubt that so often lurks in the heart of the criminal justice system. When the show began — with an utterly engrossing first hour — I felt like I knew the story. A young kid, Nasir Khan, made terrible mistakes — with each escalating decision both foolish and somehow understandable in isolation (young men do crazy things when under the spell of a beautiful woman) — but he did not kill the girl. Someone did, but not him. He’s too good of a kid.

And with that, you believe the contours are set. Will he be vindicated before the hard necessities of surviving in prison destroy his soul?

But then . . . more details emerge. Naz isn’t quite as innocent as we thought. He sells Adderall. He was expelled from school for violent attacks on two different students. In prison, he not only gets brutal, fast, he takes to the role of drug mule (and heroin user) with alarming speed. Each new tattoo seems to stand in for a new step down into the abyss, and the tattoos come fast.

At the end of the show, he goes home (hung jury) as the person who still has the most evidence pinning him to the murder, but with easily enough reasonable doubt to convince those who like Naz that he still couldn’t have killed the girl. He still has to be innocent, right?

At every stage, the state did what it should. It should have arrested Naz for the murder. It should have denied his request for bail. It should have maintained the prosecution even as circumstantial evidence emerged that could implicate additional suspects. And when the jury hung 6-6, the prosecutor made the right decision to drop the case.

Yet by doing what it should, the state may have done great damage to an innocent man. Indeed, the damage was there for all to see. The last, haunting sight of Naz, succumbing to the false bliss of narcotics at the exact location where he shared a special moment with the girl who died, was entirely appropriate. As with so many people who endure trauma, he was both broken and hardened by the experience. Nothing will be the same again.

’The Night Of’ was beautiful television, portraying a fallen world that is still somehow suffused with common grace. The characters felt real, and their combination of cynicism and dogged determination to find justice rang true to my experience with longtime key players in the criminal justice system. They just soldier on, and when the chance for justice arises, they seize it as best they can — even when they can’t shake those nagging doubts.