True Detective, Season 2 Post-Mortem: To Know True Detective

Guest review by Sam Michael Braverman

[SPOILER ALERT:  DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN THE SEASON FINALE]

I want you to know True Detective like I used to. About 18 months ago, in January of 2014, I met two tortured souls named Rust and Marty. Every Sunday for eight weeks,  I followed their trials and tribulations over a 25+ year stretch, meeting them first as grizzled husks before rewinding to show the events which had led us to the beautiful media-res in which they had first been introduced. It was a triumph, True Detective premiered and seemed to affirm that we are living in a golden age of television. Do you remember Season One?  It was glorious and we will never meet its like again.

Now we have this thing to discuss, to sift through, to try to find solace in good performances which can’t overcome slipshod dialogue, no, I say. The only possible explanation for the disparity in quality and content from seasons one to two can be that Nic Pizzaloto is fucking with us all. He is playing an expensive, and in my opinion in poor taste, practical joke. This is what I told myself every Sunday for the past seven weeks, telling myself “he’s subverting expectations so much that when this gets good it’s going to blow all our minds, right!?” I’m going to go watch the finale and get back to you, at the end of this piece, but lets reminisce a bit first…

Season One's timing was perfect; Our society arrived at peak Mconnessiance, the upward tick of Matthew McConaughey’s career which had begun in early aughts as he moved past milquetoast Rom-Coms and searched for more challenging fare like his sardonic, demented, contract killer in Killer Joe or his confused speck of humanity haunting the frames of Joe. McConaughey breathed life into the cypher of Rust’s paradigm and made dialogue like “It’s all a ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space” seem not only logical and legitimate but downright prophetic. He was a castaway from society, just enough knowledge of his past unfurled over the first six weeks to show us how a man whose only marketable skill is going undercover with drug runners and white supremacists could lose any hope in humanity. Brief glimpses of his “home” of an empty apartment, a mattress, and a cross, aided the show in successfully showing without telling us who Rust was offscreen and in doing so gave us not just a character and an actors’ astute performance but rather a flawed and tangible person.

Doing just as much heavy lifting were co-star Woody Harrelson and director for all eight episodes Cary Joji Fukunga, as the perfect foil and and focuser respectively. The paring of Hart and Cohle was electric from the first episode and we only grew more invested as, week by week, questions about our leads were answered just as more about the main investigation or the Yellow King were raised. Yes, the murder of Dora Lange was objectively a more linear investigation than the one comprising the bulk of Season Two, but that shouldn’t have mattered when it came time to unravel this seasons mystery.

           
This is why Season Two has infuriated me; This show was never about the investigations or who actually killed a young girl/old man, this show is about stellar acting supporting intriguing dialogue, anchored by cinematography that engages each location as a feature also in service of the story. This show worked because it was greater than the sum of its parts, it aspired to do nothing more than give us two people we could care about and place them in situations and locations which would inspire wonder. And it fucking worked.

           
In “The Long Bright Dark,” the first episode of the first season, the viewer learns that there is a two decade plus timeline in play, we are introduced to both our leads and they quickly assert their main character traits in a non-showy, organic, way. The posed corpse, the inquisitive detectives prompting the storyline set in the present, features the first “Rust and Marty drive in a car and Rust talks some crazy bullshit about the universe and smelling psychospheres” ALL HAPPEN IN THE FIRST TWENTY MINUTES. And it worked.

The reason I’ve taken seven hundred words to sing the praise of Season One is the same reason I’ve written this piece: I still don’t know where we went so, so, wrong. Was it the departure of Fukunga, leaving Pizzolato to steer the ship alone? Were McConaughey and Harrelson the key? Whichever DP executed that incredible tracking shot in the fourth episode of season one? WHAT WENT WRONG?!

Season Two should’ve been subtitled “Cliches” because every character, every action, every line of overwrought dialogue drips of a desperation to join the zeitgeist. This whole show has reverted from an inspired and unconventional take on a cop drama to an hour every Sunday devoted to sapping any joy or permanence from the proceedings. I don’t care about anybody this season; when they shot Paul (that was Taylor Kitsch’s character if you cared, which you probably didn’t,) I yelled at my TV because he was the closest in performance and writing to an actual character we’ve seen this time. The other leads could best be described as serviceable. In a mid-budget February release Vince Vaughn might actually be a convincing gangster, here he reads as somebody who takes a handful of painkillers before shooting every scene, words tumble out of his mouth but he hasn’t said a damn thing all season. I’m not even going to talk about the other two because since they had sex at the end of the penultimate episode they’re both irredeemable in their own personal arcs. It doesn’t make sense. It makes me sad.

Last week I was watching True Detective with my brother and four firetrucks pulled up outside. We paused the show and watched the fire trucks idle for a half hour. That is how bad this season is. I’m going to go watch the finale now and hope my hardest that it proves me wrong. I want this season to Mobius strip and prove that time is a flat circle, but I’m not holding my breath.

(Break to watch Season Finale)

Joke’s on me, everybody dies and fuck character arcs. Colin Farrell is still a shitty dad, Vince Vaughn a shitty mobster, and Rachel McAdams sad and without highlights. The script was littered with gems like “I thought we had more…time.” Can we talk about Vince Vaughn’s dad lecturing him as he walked to death? That happened. I’m referring to the actors and not the characters because eight episodes gone, I couldn’t tell you what made any of these pastiches tick or care in the slightest what happens to them. What happened to subtlety? I’m going to mail Nic Pizzolato a dictionary with the same word on every page; on every damn page it will define subtlety and nothing else. James Frain killed Colin Farrell; has James Frain been in this show the whole time? He killed Taylor Kitsch last week, does he only exist in the final two episodes of this show to shoot the main characters dramatically and show them bleeding out the mouth? HOW ABOUT THE WAY THIS SHOW FUCKING TREATS WOMEN? The men heroically dying, insisting the women get away to freedom, to a life on the run in South America?

So you win, Nicky. I watched this whole season. I’m pretty sure you’ll get at least one more shot to do this so if that happens, maybe a few less eight balls in the writers room. Lets try going back to at least a semi-coherent plot, a locale more interesting than “L.A. but with sepia tones and industrial things”, and maybe even a female character with three dimensions. I’d lament how stupid the ending to this show was but it pissed me off from the first week. This is not my beautiful house. I’m going to try and forget this season happened and in a few months probably rematch the first to be reminded of what it was like to know True Detective.