Over the course of eight episodes early last year, True Detective was electrifying. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto's show was an enthralling, suspenseful, and baffling yarn, sprawling across the bayous of Louisiana and gathering more viewers each week. Replicating that critical and popular success was never going to be easy, but early reviews of True Detective's second season haven't been kind. They're not without their generosity, however; while some seem bent on knocking the show down a peg, many hold out hope that the show proves its worth by the end of eight hours.
Regardless, through the first two episodes, Season Two is a decidedly dour affair. It's murky, stoic, and its focus on issues of masculinity---impotence, fatherhood, abandonment, weakness---feels less nuanced than last year's pursuits. However, that may be missing the point altogether. Though it bears the same title, this season of True Detective cements the show as an out-an-out anthology series, loosely connected by the crime genre but otherwise independent, for better or worse. And what has emerged as a collective desire to see Pizzolatto's perceived arrogance punished with creative failure keeps them from seeing True Detective for what it is: an anthology series, and thus one that fluctuates in scope and quality..
Instead of a central partnership, the second season adds a few more main characters to the story, which takes place in and around Vinci, a town based on tiny and notoriously corrupt Vernon, California. Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) is a former small-time gangster gone legit, lining up a business deal to get in on a large tract of land that the California government will pay handily for when constructing high-speed rail. Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) is a haggard shell of a man drinking away the tatters of his failed marriage, and firmly in Semyon's pocket thanks to a weighty favor from years before. Antigone "Ani" Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams, with a character named after Kiss Me Deadly screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides) is the heavy, a no-nonsense Ventura County Sheriff and daughter of a hippie guru who takes shit from approximately zero people. And Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) is a war veteran and Highway Patrol officer put on administrative leave after an incident with an actress where he may or may not have received oral sex in exchange for excusing some dangerous driving. (He clearly didn't, and next week's episode will reveal rather definitively why that's the case.) All of these seemingly disparate but equally miserable souls come into each other's orbit when Vinci's City Manager Ben Caspere, a man with some brazen sexual proclivities and a house full of graphic paraphernalia, goes missing.
It's a common joke with this show to wonder who is the true detective is in all of this, but there's a not a ton of mystery at the outset. Frank is the show's id, rooting around on the margins to find his business partner (Caspere) and missing money by delving back into the life of crime he just got out of cleanly. Bezzerides is the opposite extreme, the by-the-book officer who rejected the chaos of her free spirited upbringing. Velcoro is caught in the middle, under investigation for his own corruption, too indebted to Frank to pull out of a dive, and too numb to really care what direction he's shoved in. Which leaves Paul as the X factor, waiting to fall on one side or the other and tip the scales. So far it's muddy but tempting, resisting the structure of episodic television criticism. The premiere, which ended with all the characters drawn together for a case, felt much more like the opening chapter of a mystery novel than a television show, which would typically place the unifying action somewhere in the first 10 minutes. That ups the ante significantly from the first season, where two detectives investigated one case that unspooled into unspeakably dark territory---Pizzolatto deserves credit for increasing the difficulty, even if he's done it at the expense of the dark humor that Woody Harrelson brought to the table.
But the now-seasoned creator hasn't exactly endeared himself to anyone analyzing his show. There was the gushing Vanity Fair profile that drew barely-concealed laughter, as well as August's Hollywood Reporter profile where he responded to criticism by claiming, "I'm not in the service business." As if to drive his point home even harder, the first crime of the new season is perpetrated against a local newspaper reporter who publishes the "first of an eight-part series" exposing the corruption rampant in Vinci. Pizzolatto's script takes some shots at other modern cultural items that seem to rankle him---most notably, Bezzerides' e-cigarette, which gets laughed at multiple times---but it's telling that the first bit of violence in this season got doled out to a journalist.
However, that newspaper report elicits one of the touchstone scenes of these early episodes: Vaughn noting that when corruption comes to light, "everyone gets touched." Pizzolatto has chosen to focus this season not on the spiraling mystery of a murder spree, but on how the futility of applying law and order to a thoroughly corrupt city. Part of the thrill of the first season's Louisiana setting was that the milieu had been so underused in crime-drama TV. Transplanting the show to Los Angeles (possibly inspired by Pizzolatto and his wife moving to Ojai a few years ago) trades pastoral dread for the well-trod sprawl that captured detective writers like Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. Even so, there's unease plenty; the second season has an Eyes Wide Shut meets Mulholland Drive feel to it, and its occasional surrealism apes Twin Peaks better than anything on Wayward Pines.
But that combination of Lynchian tone and pulp-novel plot proves to be a struggle for Pizzolatto, and the new season is weighted down by an obsession with masculinity and phallic imagery. Velcoro is still clearly haunted by what happened to his wife, and fails miserably to be anything more to his son than a brutish, aggressive visitor. Vince Vaughn's Frank struggles to conceive with his wife, and tells a brutal story about his father abandoning him for days locked in the basement of his childhood home. Ani hides knives all over her body, and plainly states that women are the weaker sex and thus need to protect themselves. And Paul needs the help of a little blue pill to help him with his now-ex girlfriend (another mystery that will make more sense after the next episode). It's not clear yet what, if anything, those recurring character obsessions have to do with the overarching thematic concern of small-town corruption. Even if they continue on in parallel and never converge---like those grandiose helicopter shots of congested freeway interchanges---it's not the end of the world, since the show gets reset once again at the end of the season.
Anthologies losing their way in their second season is nothing new. The very nature of a clear-the-decks format means that quality is difficulty to maintain; Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story has been a roller-coaster of B-movie quality ever since it debuted. Moreover, with director Cary Fukunaga departing the show, True Detective has become Pizzolatto's vision---and Pizzolatto began his career as a fiction writer. In other words, these seasons are novellas, not sections in a grand novel. The problem with that right now is that this novella just isn't as arresting as the first one.
And that begins with the opening credits sequence---once again utterly gorgeous, once again created by Elastic, the production studio behind the opening titles for Game Of Thrones, Daredevil, and Halt And Catch Fire. (Full disclosure: They also did a video for our WIRED By Design conference.) But it errs rather disastrously in choosing Leonard Cohen's "Nevermind." Last year, the sequence's bayou imagery matched the song (The Handsome Family's "Far From Any Road") perfectly, but Cohen's tune bears almost no spiritual connection to overhead shots of freeway congestion beyond some suitably crime-thrillery lyrics ("I was not caught/Though many tried/I live among you/Well disguised").
Season One:
Season Two:
There are still glimmers of compelling excitement. Colin Farrell is making the most of playing against type as the world-weary Velcoro, who may or may not turn out to be the Janet Leigh of the show after last night's cliffhanger, the one true tense cut to black in the episodes sent out to critics. And the first two episodes, directed by Justin Lin, have a building dread to them that, while not as distinct as Fukunaga's mastery over all eight hours last season, still suggest that it's not only Pizzolatto's words that will carry the story.
Last year, many initial True Detective detractors wondered if there was any reason for yet another gritty crime drama that lingered on the bodies of dead naked women. It turned out that McConaughey and Harrelson's performances---along with Cary Fukunaga's lenswork---made the investment worthwhile. But the content criticism still stands, and maybe the most important thing about the first three episodes this season is that there are no mutilated naked women anywhere. Yes, the premiere gives one character rape in their backstory, there's a police raid at a house hosting a webcam business, detectives search a house strewn with some graphic fetish material, and one detective seems to have an appetite for online porn---but for all the sex (or lack thereof) going on, it's not hollow titillation like on Ballers. And for all the mealy-mouthed insults Velcoro hurls at the father of his son's bully, there's no line as wantonly stupid as Game of Thrones' "You want a good girl, but you need a bad pussy." (Though "I support feminism" doesn't land here as well as it might in another show.)
After three episodes last season, the story of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart had yet to reach the feverish hype of episode four's infamous six-minute tracking shot, and nobody could've predicted that the story would reach a premature conclusion in episode five before building back up through the finale. But it still had a flair that captured an audience---a flair that's lacking here. Driving scenes that crackled last season have been replaced by partner small-talk that lacks as much chemistry as it does convoluted philosophy. Right now it appears that True Detective is having an off season. But that's no reason to declare the show off the rails for good. It's just on a different track.
