Ponderous, strange and at times incoherently assembled, Nic Pizzolatto’s crime saga True Detective emerged last year as a pop culture phenomenon on the strength of its lead actors (Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson) and directorial voice (from Cary Fukunaga). Set in the Louisiana Bayou, the show exuded a twisted kind of confidence, managing a distinct sense of place and a taut manipulation of time.
As an anthology, True Detective has rebooted entirely for its second season. Its thread to the first near-exclusively consists of Pizzolatto's continued obsession with crime fiction and masculine culture, as he’s now working within an entirely new genre and structure. Fukunaga’s gorgeously spooky Gothic imagery has been replaced by an attempt to reimagine the seedy California noir of Chinatown and Mulholland Dr. The insular focus on two men has expanded to four characters, with Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams occupying the “against-type” space that McConaughey originated. The new incarnation feels like a very deliberate sequel, with Pizzolatto at times further embracing elements he was criticized for in season 1, and at others trying to prove a degree of flexibility that many asserted he didn’t have.
Pizzolatto may have been the weak link in True Detective’s debut run, but he still possessed a finesse with words and a playfulness with structure that helped to make the show so captivating. It’s hard to ignore the contributions of a great TV season’s showrunner for reasons that should be rather obvious. After all, he was – and is – its creative shepherd.
But beginning to end, True Detective season 2 – with the exception of some isolated moments of promise – succumbs to its worst tendencies. Much of it plays like parody; all of it plods along as a missed opportunity. Without Fukunaga’s cohesive directorial vision or McConaughey’s spellbinding command of character, there’s nothing left to hold onto. What’s provided is a disastrously miscalculated attempt at genre homage, and a piece of crime fiction that's mostly convoluted and frequently inert. As someone who didn’t fall as hard as some for the first season of True Detective, I don't feel punished by the weight of expectation. But by HBO's standards alone, Pizzolatto has churned out a wholly unsatisfying and severely disappointing season of TV.
With Fukunaga out of the picture (due to reported, and rumored ugly, creative differences), True Detective enlisted Fast and Furious director Justin Lin to nail down its new visual template. (He directs the first two episodes.) But rather than stylize Los Angeles in sync with the unwavering agony of the writing, Lin captures the city with procedural efficiency. His work is unimaginative, and is ultimately unable to enliven Pizzolatto's excessively dreary opening as necessary.
The first episode of this new season is pure exposition, the story needle not moving an inch until its final minutes. We meet three detectives – Antigone “Ani” Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) and Paul Woodruff (Taylor Kitsch) – along with Frank (Vince Vaughn), a high-level criminal trying to go straight. Their turmoils lurk within, and are as opaquely described as they are uniformly bland (very).
The major problems of this opening hour permeate through the rest of the production. Pizzolatto’s dialogue, the greatest sin here, is incorrectly measured, haplessly trying to align with both California noir and literary crime fiction. In the hands of Vaughn, for instance, Frank alternately speaks in philosophical ramblings and with thuggish ignorance, but only to fit a mood or an idea. There’s no logic to the shifts in speech patterns, with Vaughn lacking the grip on the character crucial to overcoming such nonsensical variation.
The show is also excessively dour, dense with suffering but without an accompanying reason to invest in the darkness. Paul is gay, closeted and tormented by his sexual orientation. Ani, we learn eventually, is a victim of sexual abuse, and her deep distrust of any kind of intimacy or authority has resulted in her carrying around knives and neglecting to ever crack a smile. Ray's wife (played by an embarrassingly wasted Abigail Spencer) was raped, and their son (long live Chad) may or may not be the perpetrator's child. Frank grew up in hard times, and his turn to criminality was out of necessity more than choice. So, yeah: fun stuff.
If, in the season premiere, it's unclear how any of this connects into something remotely interesting, the following seven episodes do little to alleviate that concern. Pizzolatto approaches intriguing ideas about masculinity, redemption and being caught in personal cycles of despair. But he doesn't follow through with anything, much less unite his characters' journeys organically. Rather, his work to bring them together is coldly artificial. They're caught up in a totally unrelated and ridiculously complicated case of city-wide corruption, its targets beyond peripheral to the central narrative. Pizzolatto throws a little cop-car banter here, a little personal dilemma there, but it never comes off as less than forced. The astonishing levels of bleakness in his writing aren't qualified by an emotional resonance, as in The Americans or Bloodline, or any sort of levity, like in The Wire or Breaking Bad, as they desperately need to be.
The character work is the season's most blatant weakness, if only because the show becomes so reliant on it. McAdams does what she can with Pizzolatto's attempt at "strong female character," playing her with weary soul and committed dreariness. But as the revelations pile up, the cliche is too strong to transcend: she's comically hardened and predictably victimized. Vaughn has the convincing physicality of a softening criminal, but as an unremarkable actor (not automatically an insult) he simply drowns underneath lines as pseudo-profound (and plain bizarre) as "like you've got blue balls in your heart." (Kelly Reilly, a normally fine actress, makes a series of strange performance choices as Jordan, Frank's wife.) Kitsch is simply a bad match here; he conveys his character's internal trauma with blank stares, a choice that results in a performance that doesn't register on any level.
And I mostly pity Colin Farrell. When given the chance to tone it down, he manages some really solid work here. Unfortunately, he's predominantly tasked with absurd bursts of anger, and the actor never dials it below hilariously hammy in such instances. (Seriously, watching Ray confront his wife's rapist was a failed exercise in "how much acting can you do?") Like I said: a lot of it plays like parody.
And I mostly pity Colin Farrell. When given the chance to tone it down, he manages some really solid work here. Unfortunately, he's predominantly tasked with absurd bursts of anger, and the actor never dials it below hilariously hammy in such instances. (Seriously, watching Ray confront his wife's rapist was a failed exercise in "how much acting can you do?") Like I said: a lot of it plays like parody.
The big defense of the stiff dialogue, unusual performances and broad characterizations comes down to genre: that True Detective season 2 is playing with tone and archetypes according to classic films of the last half-century. But within that cinematic evocation being aspiring to is a world and a group of characters you buy; and even given its heightened atmosphere, True Detective plays instead like a blunt farce. There's plenty of "detective speak" here, along with corrupt governmental officials, spontaneous moments of romance and cool-as-hell shootouts. But it's all so thin and random, cumulatively landing with a bummer of a thud. A major reason none of this stuff makes any sort of impact is that these characters trudge through the season lifelessly, merely brooding at the state of their lives. They're either theorizing in thematically empty monologues, or going on about people related to the corruption who we have no good reason to know exist, let alone why they're relevant. (Don't believe me? Check out Willa Paskin's thorough guide to the madness.)
Looking holistically at this past season, it's almost as if Pizzolatto was intently aware of his struggles with momentum and meaningful character development. Despite using the structure of a closed-ended anthology, akin to film, he turns to faux-cliffhangers to give his plot some drive. The second episode ends with Velcoro getting multiple bullets in the chest; by minute one of episode three, he's fine. Later, when he discovers that Frank (un)intentionally led him to the wrong man while on the hunt for his wife's rapist – as in, when he learns he may have killed an innocent man – episode five ends with him, in a rage, banging on Frank's door. Will he kill him? Will they strike a deal? Is the season finally getting going? Turns out it was a misunderstanding, and they have coffee, and again, nothing really happens aside from some clarification on where things are. (Because, well, it's too damn complicated.)
It's telling that, for a show supposedly working alongside film standards, Pizzolatto repeatedly turns to abrupt, half-baked dramatic choices to maintain audience investment. They're cheap shots and a betrayal of viewer trust; the story contortions are utterly unearned, and that's to say nothing of the season completely restarting at the halfway point. The narrative flimsily revitalizes after a bloody shootout occurs between our heroes and some vaguely sketched-out Mexican gang (don't ask). Despite concluding as a climactic event, it goes unmentioned in the season's final episodes and again gives the impression that it didn't matter. It's an outlier, a scene that's well-done but leaves no impact on the story or characters, and falsely promises high stakes. (Each main character makes it through, unscathed.)
Every time True Detective season 2 indicates that it's getting going, it digs itself deeper into a hole of pointlessness. The seventh episode is probably its best, directed with splendor by the great Daniel Attias. Its visual language finally attains that evocative mood and acknowledgment of location, allowing major events including a character death and a long-awaited hook-up to land with power, if not logic. But in the season finale, Pizzolatto doubles-down on the half-expository, half-preposterous dialogue; on the mystery too peripheral and too convoluted to make any sort of narrative impact; and on his vision of the Golden State that never sounds or looks realized-enough to express a definitive vibe. Without a sense of place or character or story, the season finale can only reveal the hollowness of the entire concoction. And it does.
Once Lin exits and a diverse slate of great directors comes in, True Detective periodically, effectively revisits the haunting beauty that Fukunaga initially delivered. But without that singular vision, there's no pronounced communication in the imagery, aside from way too many overhead shots of the So-Cal highway system. (Look, everything's interconnected!) It's a shame, because underneath it all, Pizzolatto is relentlessly trying to explore an intriguing aspect of history. He's milking ideas of fatalism, corruption and the terrifying undercurrent of progress. But he cannot settle on what he's trying to say, and no collaborator in this version of True Detective is there to help him find a cogent message.
Here's the true, confounding element of True Detective's second season: what, exactly, do you walk away with? What does it try to say, much less actually communicate? It's a cluster of undercooked ideas that have no business resting side-by-side. A lot can be forgiven in the service of ambitious, thoughtful storytelling. But True Detective suffers due to its void of intent. It changes itself by the episode, unable to maintain momentum even with that degree of chaos embedded in its construction. Pizzolatto's most lasting crime, then, is turning a show of potentially-entertaining insanity into a painfully pretentious slog.
Grade: D