True Detective and the Unknowable Alchemy of Good Television

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Do you remember when everybody was waiting with baited breath for the second season of True Detective? You should: it wasn’t long ago, and the internet was overflowing with casting rumors and #truedetectiveseason2 hashtags. The first season, featuring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, was so engaging and featured such excellent performances that it was difficult to imagine how a follow-up season, utilizing a completely different cast, story, and location, could live up.

The answer was pretty simple: it couldn’t. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying. The cast of the second season, which featured Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch, really poured their heart and souls into their performances. It is clear watching that they all realized both the burden they were taking on and the opportunity that they had been given. On projects like this, actors really have to give in and trust their writer and director completely, even when they can’t personally envision how the end product will work.

In such a climate, it would be easy to see how all of the performers could have let writer Nic Pizzolatto’s terrible dialogue slide by. After all, would season 1’s dialogue really look much better on paper, with its digressions and ruminations on how time is a flat circle and morality doesn’t exist? Was season 2’s writing really THAT much different? In all honesty, it probably wasn’t. But perhaps the strength of True Detective’s first season didn’t lie in the writing, but the entire creative ensemble.

Yes, season 1’s dialogue was overwrought and ridiculous at many times, but full-season director Cary Fukunaga conveyed such a creepy, otherworldly tone that it all felt consistent. The characters in the show treated McConaughey’s Rust Cohle like a crazy person, but as viewers, we could see how his ramblings could actually be words of wisdom from a man more in-tune with his surroundings than anybody else. The actors all seemed onboard with Fukunaga’s vision, too. In fact, if there was any clashing of intent, it was likely between Pizzolatto and Fukunaga, the former of which wanted a series grounded in reality and the latter of which wanted to create an eerie tableau with hints of the supernatural.

So maybe it’s no surprise that when Pizzolatto hired a number of directors for season 2, he wound up with a show that skewed closer to reality than its predecessor. This misunderstanding of tone is largely responsible for True Detective Season 2’s shortcomings. For one, it takes place in LA, a location that we’re used to seeing portrayed in cop shows and movies. For another, there is no indication that anything especially strange is going on. There’s corruption and moral indecency, but they’re the kinds of things that we’ve come to expect from LA crime stories. The show briefly flirts with weirdness in the early episodes, in which a man in a bird mask shoots a protagonist and the victim dreams of Elvis impersonators and his favorite bar as a waypoint between life and death. This sort of strangeness evaporates immediately afterward, though.

So when every single character speaks in either short “badass” quips or overlong melodramatic monologues, it feels out of step with the world that Pizzolatto is trying to portray. Season 2 is desperately in need of Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart, a salt-of-the-earth guy calling out all of the pretentious bullshit being spouted by the other characters. As it is, the season stinks of trying too hard to be cool, and when the plotline never really gels and ends in an anti-climax, it’s even harder to feel like we didn’t waste our time.

Again, many of these complaints could be thrown at the first season as well: pretentious dialogue, overlong monologues, a lack of a satisfying climax, among others. But the first season’s assembled pieces managed to take the flaws in the script and turn them into a singularly unique piece of television. Pizzolatto can continually reshuffle his actors and directors, but when that very combination is what made his first season special, he is doomed to disappoint continually. True Detective’s curse is that its purpose is self defeating.

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