Like “Misplaced” and its numerous 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,” “Recreation of Thrones” and lots of others, its mythological attain exceeded its grasp, with free ends sprawling, purple herrings in all places and an ending that disenchanted true believers by leaving essential mysteries unsolved. And like many prestige-era reveals, not simply supernatural puzzle-boxers but additionally extra practical dramas like “The Sopranos” (with its near-death experiences and visions of the Virgin Mary), it has a powerful 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 nearly all status tv, it has some pointless nudity.
This condensation of a whole period’s value of themes and tendencies helps clarify the primary season’s cultural endurance, and likewise the frustration, in various varieties, that’s greeted the totally different makes an attempt to recapture the magic within the subsequent installments of the present — together with the most recent effort, “True Detective: Evening Nation,” whose finale simply aired final weekend.
Freddie deBoer, in an pleasant rant, argues that this recurring disappointment invests the unique season with a high quality that it doesn’t really possess. “Each season of ‘True Detective’ thus far has been unhealthy,” he argues, “most definitely together with the primary,” and nearly the whole lot that followers have discovered unsatisfying within the sequels was proper there within the main installment. He does a great job of exhuming the disenchanted reactions to the primary season’s finale — right here’s my very own — whereas puzzling over why, provided that the ending was “extensively thought of a flop,” everybody has subsequently “imbued the season with a lot nostalgia that it’s now continuously 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 if you happen to sit down and rewatch the primary season facet by facet with the latest season, “Evening Nation,” you’ll be able to 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. However it simply doesn’t deliver what the primary one introduced: The lead actors don’t have the chemistry that the leads within the authentic 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 monitoring 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 must be famous, Pizzolatto appears to have borrowed from the present’s different father, the anti-humanist horror novelist Thomas Ligotti).
