Like “Misplaced” and its varied imitators, “True Detective” is a “puzzle field” present, with a sprawling mythology for followers to obsess over, scrutinizing each body for clues and secrets and techniques. As with “Misplaced,” “Sport of Thrones” and plenty of others, its mythological attain exceeded its grasp, with unfastened ends sprawling, purple herrings all over the place and an ending that disenchanted true believers by leaving essential mysteries unsolved. And like many prestige-era exhibits, not simply supernatural puzzle-boxers but additionally extra lifelike dramas like “The Sopranos” (with its near-death experiences and visions of the Virgin Mary), it has a robust post-secular vibe, taking part in round with magic and faith, hanging out in a liminal area between Christianity and paganism, however leaving its true metaphysical perspective considerably unresolved.
Additionally, like virtually all status tv, it has some pointless nudity.
This condensation of a complete period’s price of themes and tendencies helps clarify the primary season’s cultural endurance, and in addition the frustration, in various kinds, that’s greeted the completely different makes an attempt to recapture the magic within the subsequent installments of the present — together with the newest effort, “True Detective: Night time Nation,” whose finale simply aired final weekend.
Freddie deBoer, in an enjoyable rant, argues that this recurring disappointment invests the unique season with a top quality that it doesn’t really possess. “Each season of ‘True Detective’ to date has been dangerous,” he argues, “most definitely together with the primary,” and nearly every little thing that followers have discovered unsatisfying within the sequels was proper there within the major installment. He does a superb job of exhuming the disenchanted reactions to the primary season’s finale — here’s my own — whereas puzzling over why, on condition that the ending was “broadly thought of a flop,” everybody has subsequently “imbued the season with a lot nostalgia that it’s now ceaselessly held up as a masterpiece.”
I don’t assume Season 1 was a masterpiece, precisely; I agree with deBoer that it ended too disappointingly for that. However when you sit down and rewatch the primary season facet by facet with the most recent season, “Night time Nation,” you possibly can see why the unique has retained such an intense fan base.
Season 4 is seemingly designed to be a mirror picture of the primary one, with the frozen Arctic as a substitute of the steamy bayou, feminine cops as a substitute of male detectives, Jodie Foster supplying the movie-star gravitas (and a Clarice Starling callback) as a substitute of McConaughey and Harrelson, an Inuit goddess haunting the proceedings as a substitute of some Lovecraftian cosmic horror. But it surely simply doesn’t carry what the primary one introduced: The lead actors don’t have the chemistry that the leads within the unique loved, there’s nothing within the construction to match the efficient flashback framing utilized in Season 1, the cinematography doesn’t match Fukunaga’s work, there aren’t any set items that match the primary season’s well-known use of a six-minute tracking shot in a police raid, and there’s nothing within the dialogue as arresting because the baroque nihilistic monologuing of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle (a few of which, it ought to be famous, Pizzolatto appears to have borrowed from the present’s different father, the anti-humanist horror novelist Thomas Ligotti).
