HBO
Two months ago, I asked a deceptively simple question: what is True Detective? Since then, we’ve watched together as season two of Nic Pizzolatto’s cop drama both attempted to answer that question and stubbornly defied categorization. True Detective is a show about legacy; it’s an homage to the classics of the detective novel and film noir; it’s a fragment of Lynchian pop culture; it’s a writing exercise that expanded to swallow up its own foundation.
Eight episodes later and most of us – those being fair in our evaluation of the second season – are no closer to a perfect understanding of Pizzolatto’s show than we were at the conclusion of season one. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t learn a few lessons along the way. In setting out to do something different, Pizzolatto has conveniently mapped some of the borders of what True Detective might be.
Here are my five key takeaways from True Detective, season two.
Three Is Company, Five Is a Crowd
Back in the True Detective offseason, when fans were looking for any insight into the show’s second season, one of the most interesting pieces of writing was a Vanity Fair interview with showrunner Nic Pizzolatto. In the interview, Rich Cohen documents Pizzolatto’s quick rise to superstardom within Hollywood and asks the writer about his plans for the show’s second season. “I think whatever I had to say about the buddy-cop genre I said,” Pizzolatto answered, setting the stage for myriad second-guessing in the months to come. “Do you really just want to see two stars riding around in a car talking?”
Within the context of the interview, it’s a nondescript answer, one echoing the promise of every rising artist to keep pushing new boundaries and testing themselves against the limits of their craft. In the contentious world of True Detective fandom, however, these words may as well be Pizzolatto’s eulogy. Would audiences have reacted better if season two were only Ray Velcoro and Frank Semyon swapping vague threats in a bar? Should we admire Pizzolatto’s attempt to crafter a three-dimensional female officer in Bezzerides or condemn the man for not knowing his own limitations? Would we rather True Detective be a great show that lacks in diversity or a mediocre show that tries to set an example?
If there is some kind of common ground between fans and critics of the series, it is that Pizzolatto’s desire to be more than the guy who writes two stars in a car caused him to overcorrect and create a needlessly complicated web of people. At its heart, the first season of True Detective was a self-contained structure of love and lies between three people. With season two, Pizzolatto expanded his main cast to five characters, choosing to provide each with unrelated relationships and complex backstories. The need to keep switching between storylines made it difficult for Pizzolatto to lock characters like Woodrugh and Jordan Semyon fully into place; it also guaranteed that audiences would leave disappointed with a lack of closure for all involved. If Pizzolatto is unwilling to find a happy medium between the bloated narrative of season two and the “stars in cars” ease of season one, then the only streamlined True Detective we can look forward to hinges on the availability of serial tinkerers Topher Grace and Steven Soderbergh.
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