According to Owen Gleiberman, the HBO drama wowed viewers a year ago, but its disappointing second season demonstrates how difficult it is for TV to catch up to the film industry.
The most straightforward way to sum up the problems with HBO’s True Detective’s second season after five episodes (out of eight) is that the show forgot it was a movie. It is now only a TV show instead. A huge error! It is currently fashionable to claim that TV is better than movies in the renaissance era of television, but the irony of that claim is that it is predicated on a quality standard that is virtually exclusively drawn from the motion picture industry.
There are not many television programs that have the boldness, ambition, visual intricacy, and gloom that we associate with great movies, and that look and feel like movies. However, when they do—The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and a handful of other shows—you always get the impression that the big screen is being channeled from the little screen.
One of the few shows to be included in this pantheon was True Detective’s first season. One cannot overstate how much the entire world seemed to be talking about Matthew McConaughey’s brilliant, neurotically talkative performance as the damaged, deadbeat detective Rust Cohle. Its relatively short running time (just eight episodes) gave it a sustained, addictive excitement. Many people thought that McConaughey’s work on True Detective was the main factor in his Oscar victory for Dallas Buyers Club. You felt as though you were plunging into an existential abyss alongside him because of the ruthless intensity of his acting throughout the series.
Nevertheless, True Detective has wasted the lesson of McConaughey’s outstanding performance in its second season: if you show your characters without an emotional safety net and make it clear that anything can happen, the audience will gladly tumble into the abyss with them. There were long-running rumors that Tom Cruise might appear in season two, which may have been a wise decision for the show and the actor.
Rather, the producers selected a group of gifted second-class actors who have the potential to be the main characters in True Detective’s ninth season. Yes, it is amazing to watch Vince Vaughn play a heavy instead of his reflexive jokiness. The most pressing aspect of the series is perhaps his tense, melancholy portrayal of Frank Semyon, a Los Angeles mobster who has had his riches stolen and is attempting to regain his position of authority. Colin Farrell, though? He is a talented actor, but he is too calm; he is never more aloof than when he is attempting to smoulder.
Murky and mystifying
The three police investigators at the center of this season are all meant to be extremely flawed and troubled individuals, yet the performers all have the laid-back likeability that television obsessively values. Rachel McAdams portrays the troubled Ani Bezzerides as a lady full of energy and ambition; despite her father problems and careless professional relationships, she is more of an advocate for empowerment than a trainwreck.
Ray Velcoro, the violent and moody detective, is meant to represent a man who has lost everything because of his flammable nature, but Farrell gives him a melancholy that makes him seem like a puppy who has just been kicked. Taylor Kitsch’s portrayal of the sexually inhibited former Black-ops soldier Paul Woodrugh is akin to a soap opera version of James Dean’s sensitivity in the 1950s. Why these three decided to collaborate on a homicide investigation in the first place or were persuaded to do so has never been fully understood. It would not be too far to envisage Cagney, Mopy, and Down-Low as a cop-show trio on prime-time US network TV.
Then again, as Hollywood proved in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it doesn’t take great actors to make a great film noir; the art is mostly in the ingenuity of pulpy mysteries that keep us hanging on every twist. And ingenuity is just what the current season of True Detective lacks. Instead, it’s an LA noir with oodles of obscure plot complications that tend to go nowhere. The show has more aerial shots of LA’s twisted-ribbon highways than you can count, yet beneath the flashy visual flourishes it keeps recycling and juggling old tropes.
The show is a pastiche in quest of a vision; Nic Pizzolatto, the creator and writer of the series, is skilled at crafting dialogue full of underhanded jabs, but it primarily feels like you are watching a haphazard selection of sequences from his DVD collection. In order to imitate the water scandals of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Vaughn’s character Frank is involved in a botched attempt to buy land around a proposed high-speed train system. This land grab combines criminal behavior with government corruption. The main location is Vinci, a sour industrial area in southern California; nonetheless, do not worry, Jake—this is not Chinatown. This plan is not compelling since it does not imply that the system is decaying from the inside out. It is merely a dry business transaction with fake backers.
In search of a point
The plot spins around the gruesome murder of a corrupt official who was holding Frank’s $5m investment (which has now been stolen). The trail leads to that soggy old cliché, a ‘heart of darkness’: brothels with creepy animal masks, wealthy sex-trade customers who are systematically blackmailed. Maybe the remaining three episodes will push this somewhere new and interesting, but so far there’s an overly familiar, tediously shocking quality to these kinky developments. We’ve seen them before, in thrillers from 8mm to Eyes Wide Shut to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. As for Lera Lynn, who plays the solo saloon singer who strums her gloomy ballads each time Frank and Ray huddle for a backroom meeting, she’s the purest kitsch, and not just because she seems to be playing every last set on the bar’s weekly schedule. The spotlight that shines on her as she drones her songs is pure David Lynch – and really, is there anything more mannered than slavishly imitating a filmmaker as original as Lynch? Does Pizzolatto think we haven’t seen Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive?
The grisly homicides in the first season of True Detective had a familiar quality too – very Thomas Harris – and the mystery didn’t completely add up. The series presented cult murders committed by a secret society of Southern Gothic elites, then linked those crimes to a backwoods serial killer living like a hillbilly Norman Bates. How did these disparate crimes fit together? Not too believably. Yet if the revelations were less than convincing, True Detective still conjured an unfolding bloom of evil, and the bravura acting of McConaughey and Woody Harrelson tapped into the desperation of masculinity in our time: the feeling that their appetites could not be contained by domestic life.
Pizzolatto often comes off like an apologist for male rage, but that’s what gives his dialogue its sting. Yet in season two, with Ani the crusader to balance things out, the series feels both more sexually correct and more scattershot. At a certain point, you may find yourself asking: what do these characters’ problems really have to do with each other? Pizzolatto still has to connect a lot of dots, and the prospect is starting to sound arduous. A sinister web is one thing; the new True Detective feels more like an explanatory diagram of corruption. There are many unanswered questions, but there’s little in the way of true mystery, because the characters, despite all that twisty highway imagery, aren’t trapped in a labyrinth. They’re trapped in a story that feels like a road full of danger – but turns out to be just an endless series of detours.
