Now that we've got enough distance from it, maybe we can see the first season of True Detective
for what it really was—and please understand that I say this with as
much awe and affection as I can muster: it was trash shined up like
gold. It was lurid, pulpy and perverse, completely ridiculous and
borderline reprehensible, but it was dressed up in the classy couture of
A-list acting talent, bravura visual style, and just enough writerly
writer-ing to allow us to ignore what pop-nihilist nonsense it all was.
It was one of those rare cultural phenomenon where its critics could
rattle off all of its sins, and its ardent fans (like me) would cry out,
"Yes! Exactly!" Good God, it was awesome. But was it art? Oy. Let's not get carried away.
Which brings us to season two, and its batshit premiere episode—dead bodies, Internet porn, drugs, drinking, corruption, beatings, brass knuckles, and charming bon mots like, "I'll butt-fuck your father on this lawn with your mother's headless corpse," all in the first hour—and which should chase away any lingering doubt about what True Detective ever was, and clearly still is. It's still trash shined up like gold. The trash is a bit trashier this time, and the gold a bit less shiny, but the theory still abides.
Much has been made about the departure of the first season's director, Cary Fukunaga, who reportedly clashed with True Detective's
writer, creator, and expert self-mythologizer, Nic Pizzolatto; the
expectation appears to be that Fukunaga's exit will bring the show
crashing back to Earth in season two, that Pizzolatto supplied the
mumbo-jumbo and that Fukunaga was responsible for everything that was,
you know, good. Nonsense. Two things are clear from the season-two
premiere: One, Fukunaga will be missed—his replacement, Fast & Furious
franchise veteran Justin Lin, has done a credible job preserving the
show's signature gloom and noir-ish palette, but he's got a much heavier
hand and much less patience for letting dread build slowly; and two,
this is Pizzolatto's show, to the bone. This is his vision—the macro
theme of season two seems to be, once again, all the evil that powerful
white men do—and these are his words.
(And by the way, can I make a brief case that Pizzolatto's words are underrated? Yes, I think we could've all done with one fewer monologue from Matthew McConaughey about flat circles and the nature of man… But I also laughed out loud during a second-episode car conversation between Colin Farrell and e-cig-smoking Rachel McAdams, in which Farrell says that e-cigs creep him out because he can't avoid the feeling that "they're smoking me" and it's just too close to "sucking a robot's dick.")
The catalyzing incident for season two's plot is the brutal death—of course it's brutal; on a show like this, is there another kind?—of a corrupt, sex-crazed city manager, whose demise brings together three cops (Farrell, McAdams and Taylor Kitsch) and one cash-strapped gangster (Vince Vaughn) to investigate a case that its not clear whether anyone really wants solved. It's hard to explain why all four of these people get joined at the hip, and please don't ask me to, because I definitely don't understand it. The setting is an imaginary Los Angeles exurb called Vinci, the kind of soulless industrial hellhole inhabited only by crooked businessmen, crooked-er bureaucrats and ravaged prostitutes; it was vaguely inspired, Pizzolatto has said, by the real-life soulless industrial hellhole of Vernon, California, and it's the sort of place where writers set murder mysteries mostly so they can weave them into allegorical tapestries about American greed.
Did I mention that the show also still a ton of fun? Pizzolatto is far too shrewd, and far too base, to let his grander meditations get in the way of a rollicking story. Unlike with season one, which was set in Louisiana and unfolded at a bayou-worthy pace, season two begins with its four main characters careening off the rails, and they're only gathering more speed. Two of them (Farrell and Vaughn) are infertile, one (Kitsch) is impotent, and the last, McAdams, has a porn star for a sister and submerged issues about dirty sex that—I'm just guessing here—will probably get explored. So okay, fine, season two isn't as good. Of course it's not. But so what? Give me more.
Which brings us to season two, and its batshit premiere episode—dead bodies, Internet porn, drugs, drinking, corruption, beatings, brass knuckles, and charming bon mots like, "I'll butt-fuck your father on this lawn with your mother's headless corpse," all in the first hour—and which should chase away any lingering doubt about what True Detective ever was, and clearly still is. It's still trash shined up like gold. The trash is a bit trashier this time, and the gold a bit less shiny, but the theory still abides.
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(And by the way, can I make a brief case that Pizzolatto's words are underrated? Yes, I think we could've all done with one fewer monologue from Matthew McConaughey about flat circles and the nature of man… But I also laughed out loud during a second-episode car conversation between Colin Farrell and e-cig-smoking Rachel McAdams, in which Farrell says that e-cigs creep him out because he can't avoid the feeling that "they're smoking me" and it's just too close to "sucking a robot's dick.")
The catalyzing incident for season two's plot is the brutal death—of course it's brutal; on a show like this, is there another kind?—of a corrupt, sex-crazed city manager, whose demise brings together three cops (Farrell, McAdams and Taylor Kitsch) and one cash-strapped gangster (Vince Vaughn) to investigate a case that its not clear whether anyone really wants solved. It's hard to explain why all four of these people get joined at the hip, and please don't ask me to, because I definitely don't understand it. The setting is an imaginary Los Angeles exurb called Vinci, the kind of soulless industrial hellhole inhabited only by crooked businessmen, crooked-er bureaucrats and ravaged prostitutes; it was vaguely inspired, Pizzolatto has said, by the real-life soulless industrial hellhole of Vernon, California, and it's the sort of place where writers set murder mysteries mostly so they can weave them into allegorical tapestries about American greed.
Did I mention that the show also still a ton of fun? Pizzolatto is far too shrewd, and far too base, to let his grander meditations get in the way of a rollicking story. Unlike with season one, which was set in Louisiana and unfolded at a bayou-worthy pace, season two begins with its four main characters careening off the rails, and they're only gathering more speed. Two of them (Farrell and Vaughn) are infertile, one (Kitsch) is impotent, and the last, McAdams, has a porn star for a sister and submerged issues about dirty sex that—I'm just guessing here—will probably get explored. So okay, fine, season two isn't as good. Of course it's not. But so what? Give me more.
