The series is back, but without all its key ingredients.
Review by Brandon Wolfe
Anthology series seem to work at cross purposes with the modern appeal of television. For bygone shows like The Twilight Zone, the format made perfect sense on an episodic basis, allowing for the telling of a different mindbending tale each week, but for most viewers today, TV characters are seen as buddies to spend a few years checking in on, to watch grow and evolve. We become attached to these fictional people and enjoy spending 30-60 minutes of our week in their company. Their lives become extensions of our own. It’s one of the unique traits of television over films and books, that experience of observing characters on a weekly basis over an extended period of time. The anthology format is antithetical to this. By reshuffling the deck, that sense of intimacy and familiarity is lost.
This is the approach that HBO’s True Detective has opted to take in its second season. Gone are detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), as well as the haunting Louisiana setting. This new season makes a clean break as it sets up shop in Southern California and sets its focus upon a new case investigated by a new collection of troubled cops. But it’s not merely the characters that have been jettisoned for True Detective’s sophomore year. The season premiere essentially removes everything that made the first-season premiere so instantly striking. The gorgeously shot landscape of the Deep South has been replaced by far less arresting glimpses of interwoven networks of freeways. The eerie occult murders and horrific crime-scene displays have given way to a much more straightforward murder case. And that dual-timeline device that followed the characters simultaneously at two vastly different points in their lives? Kiss it goodbye.
In other words, rather than continue the adventures of the mismatched cops we came to love, True Detective has opted to strip itself of everything that made it distinctive, reinventing itself as a far more traditional, less idiosyncratic cop show. The focus is now on a trio of cops – Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), Detective Antigone 'Ani' Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) and CHP Officer Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) – as well as career criminal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), and the murder case that gradually, by the premiere’s final moments, places them all in the same orbit. As before, the cops are trainwrecks steeped in personal demons. Velcoro, who moonlights as an enforcer for Semyon due to the latter helping the cop locate the man who raped his wife several years earlier, is an angry, drunken mess, fighting for visitation rights to a son he alternately dotes on and abuses. Bezzerides has drinking problems of her own (which, given that this is True Detective, is probably going to be redundant to keep pointing out), severe enough that she is ejected from a casino for being disorderly. She also grapples with family issues concerning her dippy guru father and webcam-girl sister. Woodrugh, put on suspension after pulling over a drunken actress and being accused of soliciting favors from her, is covered with mysterious scars and is prone to recklessly traversing the highways on his motorcycle at night, in the dark, at 100 MPH, with no helmet.
We spend the entirety of “The Western Book of the Dead” trying to figure out how these people connect to each other before Woodrugh’s suicide run makes it clear. After narrowly avoiding a deadly spill, he finds himself staring at the body of Ben Caspere, a missing city manager who was in bed with Semyon on a lucrative high-speed rail deal and was in possession of a good chunk of Frank’s money at the time of his disappearance. After Woodrugh calls in his findings, Velcoro and Bezzerides are the detectives that arrive on the scene, indicating that the Caspere case is going to become this year’s hunt for the Yellow King.
The new cast is filled with capable actors, but is intrinsically less interesting than before. Much of what instantly made True Detective a must-see was the prospect of McConaughey and Harrelson teaming up for a television series. McConaughey was smack in the middle of his big-screen “McConaissance” due to his acclaimed roles in Dallas Buyer’s Club, Mud and The Wolf of Wall Street, while Harrelson was smack in the middle of the blockbuster Hunger Games series, in which he has a pivotal role. Neither of these guys needed to do this show, which made the fact that they were doing it seem worthy of our attention. By contrast, everyone in the second season of True Detective very much needs to do this. Vaughn, once a reliable A-List comedy star, has been in a career freefall in recent years, appearing in bomb after bomb. Farrell, a fine actor who has always seemed to exist a couple inches outside the grasp of mainstream stardom, hasn’t had a hit in some time, a fate shared by McAdams. And Taylor Kitsch, who headlined two notorious flops, John Carter and Battleship, within months of each other in 2012, is probably happy to still be in the business at this point. All of these actors are talented, but precisely none of them are exciting choices to pick up the True Detective mantle, and that lack of fizz is difficult to ignore.
The lack of fizz also trickles down to series writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto, whose inelegant, subtlety-deprived writing style was never one of True Detective’s greatest strengths. Pizzolatto’s dialogue is cumbersome and overly florid, filled with all manner of highfalutin literary illusions, and his storytelling skills in the first season never amounted to much more than a lurid potboiler. The true stars of True Detective were Cary Fukunaga, the director of each of the first season’s eight impeccably shot episodes, and McConaughey, who actually made Pizzolatto’s tortured, absurdly ostentatious musings sound as poetic and insightful as I’m sure they did in the writer’s head. The loss of these two participants is crippling. Justin Lin, director of the bulk of the Fast and Furious series, does serviceable work, but Fukunaga’s visuals were unparalleled, not just on TV but in film as well. And McConaughey’s performance (not to slight Harrelson, who was also fantastic) was so hypnotic and captivating that it’s hard to imagine anyone in the current cast – or maybe even anyone – matching it.
And that’s the irrefutable issue here: the spectre of Season 1 haunts and bedevils Season 2 at every turn. “The Western Book of the Dead” trudges through its hour, setting up its characters and world without finding a reason or a means to make us care about any of it, as though Pizzolatto now feels that he commands the audience’s attention simply by showing up. The episode carries with it an oppressive solemnity, apparently forgetting that True Detective once frequently brightened up the gloom with humor, and that unflappable seriousness doesn’t do it many favors. There’s also the fact that McConaughey and Harrelson were playing archetypes, same as this new crew, yet breathed a good deal of vibrancy into them straight away to make them feel richer, which isn’t the case thus far in the second go-round. Farrell, in particular, has played so many variations on this particular breed of sleazy, volatile disreputability that his character seems especially familiar in a detrimental way. But there remain seven episodes for True Detective to find its groove. And if it doesn’t work out, hey, maybe we can get Rust and Marty back on the case for Season 3.
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