Did We Ever Get True Detective Right? Night Country Is Another Argument That We Didn't

 

 

When True Detective came out in January of 2014, it seemed like a breath of fresh air, what the world of Peak TV could and should look like in an era that was transitioning after the departure of Breaking Bad the previous September. In December of 2014, in what would be their end of year retrospective, the magazine Entertainment Weekly aired side by side two retrospectives of Season 1: one defending it as a masterpiece, the other calling an utter and complete failure. The fact that in that same issue the magazine listed the scene where Matthew McConaughey says “Time is a flat circle’ the best scene in all of 2014 reflects the polarizing nature of the show.

I remember having similar feelings. Looking at my initial review, I thought that the first episodes indicated a potential masterpiece and I hailed the performances of Harrelson and McConaughey as some of the best work I’d seen in TV in a long time. However, when I looked at my top ten list for 2014 True Detective wasn’t even on it. That in itself means nothing – among the series I considered superior that year were MTV’s Faking It and the first season of The Mindy Project – but it does reflect how much my opinion had changed since the start of the year that I don’t even remember thinking twice about including it.

Now, as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of its debut, I’m starting to wonder if critics like myself got it wrong from the start about the show. I do appreciate what it did for the limited series genre; it’s debut along with Fargo in 2014 jolted a medium that really didn’t exist (certainly not out of the confines of HBO) into what has now essentially become the golden age of Limited Series. I didn’t even bother to cover them back in 2014 when I was doing blow-by-blows for awards show such as the Emmys; now because they are so vital to the industry I find myself constantly wondering which I should watch. And while many aspects of TV are in transition, few would dispute the Limited Series remains at peak valued. When the HCA can find twelve candidates to nominated for Best Limited Series on Broadcast, Cable and Streaming and yet somehow not include among them White House Plumbers, George and Tammy, The Patient and Love and Death, then I’d say we’ll be fine there for a while to come.

But ten years later, I’m starting to wonder what there was about True Detective that so many people – I include myself – really thought was so incredible. I acknowledge that technically so many parts of it were magnificent: the brilliant camera work and direction by Cary Jo Fujikawa, the mood set by the music of T-Bone Burnett and the masterful performances by the two leads. But all of this seem to be window dressing to a story that at the end of the day really doesn’t have anything we hadn’t already seen before a hundred times.

Ritualistic pose of a naked woman, turns out to be a prostitute? Pretty sure Criminal Minds or Law & Order: SVU does it at least three times a season and wraps it up in an hour. Two partners, one a family man, one with a very dark past and mindset? That’s not that different from the set-up from Lethal Weapon, though Mel Gibson was not nearly as philosophical about his darkness and more suicidal than Cohle is. Detective who seems to have a knack for profiling bizarre cases? That’s how Fox Mulder started out, and it’s basically the definition of so many criminal profilers. (In fact Cohle in both philosophy and eerie ability to see things not that far removed from Frank Black in Millennium.)  And when it comes to the reason Hart and Cohle were estranged, it was the cliché we’ve seen so many times before: Hart’s wife had sex with Cohle and the two had a fight over it. Even the idea of two former partners getting back together to solve a case they thought they had, that’s the plot of so many films I don’t even have to bother to list them all, you can probably think of them without trying.

What is unique in the first season was Nic Pizzolato starting a pattern of a setup with supernatural overtones that he never pays off on. You get the feeling with him that the mystery part of the procedural – which is, for all intents and purpose all True Detective, is the least interesting part to him. That wouldn’t necessarily be a flaw if he were at least willing to follow through with it at the end. But after a season of building up the possibility of the supernatural, he reveals that the killers was human and traditional all along. I’m actually more shocked that Pizzolato was appalled so many people got the idea this was supernatural when he’d spent six episodes implying it. And that tone basically held clear in all subsequent versions.

What’s really shocking, considering how anticlimactic most fans found the end of Season 1 was just how high the expectations were going forward. Don’t get me wrong: the second season was absolutely horrible and more than deserves all the scorn it got at the time and today. I’m also relatively unsure it would have worked had it come under a different brand. But I still don’t know why so many people thought considering how mediocre the story was, why the second season, which is essentially the same type of story, albeit more in LA, was such a disappointment.

I thought the third season was a huge improvement: that one did make my top ten list of 2019. (Don’t judge me that highly; Chernobyl wasn’t on that list.) I still believe the work of Mahershala Ali was worthy of an Emmy and that Stephen Dorff and Carmen Ejogo were robbed of nominations. But the fundamental flaws were still there and that’s because it was too close to the first version. It only worked at all because it managed to rise and fall on the work of Ali but there were still basically all the same flaws that were there and even less of a payout at the end.

What becomes increasingly frustrating with each new season of True Detective is how much better other limited series are at not only making a compelling mystery, but also building character around it and a compelling ending. HBO alone has in the decade since True Detective debuted given us The Night of, Big Little Lies (the first season) Sharp Objects, The Undoing, and Mare of Easttown. Yes the murder at the center of each show was a jumping off-point for a character study but none of these series forgot the murder mattered and they went out of their way to make the solution resonate. By contrast Pizzolato basically seemed to spend three seasons having a lot of intense cinematography and editing, around some deep, mostly misogynistic philosophies and the solution matters nothing to the protagonists and apparently less to the creator.

All of which is a roundabout way of wondering that when I got around to watching the first two episodes of  Night Country, the fourth season of True Detective, I wasn’t sure whether to be optimistic or expect more of the same. To be sure, it wants you to believe that it’s going to be in a completely different vein of the three previous seasons. (Officially it’s not even part of that series, it’s based on it though Pizzolato, Harrelson and McConaughey are among the executive producers.)

It has a different creative force: Issa Lopez, who wrote and directed all six episodes. It’s set in Alaska in December, right after the sun sets for the last time in the year and it’s just within range of the Arctic Circle. Considering that all three seasons were essentially set mostly in sun-drenched, often desert locales, that’s a decent move forward. And unlike all three incarnations where female characters were either victims or sex objects, Night Country has a primarily female cast. Jodie Foster is making her TV debut in nearly a half century of acting as Chief Danvers, Kali Reis plays Deputy Navarro, a woman of color in a region of the county where she stands out even more and a powerhouse talent such as Fiona Shaw, looking both frail and powerful. I want to believe that this version of True Detective has learned from its mistakes and has found a way to deliver a compelling narrative that corrects all those flaws. But I have been down this road too many times before, and it’s hard to ignore the fact that, at least in the first two episodes, while there have been many changes, they all seem to be more atmospheric rather than dealing with the flaws at the center of every incarnation including the first.

The set up in the first two episodes at least has a certain level of difference. The series begins with the sun about to go down and were in an Alaskan station where a bunch of men are going through was appears to be unwinding after a hard day’s work. Then in the midst of their dining, one of the men begins to have a seizure and says: “She’s here.” Then the power goes out. Three days later the supply man drives up to find the station deserted, except for a tongue.

Danvers is called to the station when it is found deserted and spends the first episode trying to figure out if the eight men in the station have just gone missing or are dead. Navarro shows up when she learns about the tongue and  she believes the tongue has to do with an indigenous activist who was brutally murdered six years ago with her tongue cut out and never found. The two have a history and Danvers tells her to get lost. Naturally she then begins to pursue the activist’s death with her new favorite, a young policeman who is married, has a toddler son – and happens to be the son of the former chief who still works there (John Hawkes). She then uses him to go into his father’s house and steal files on the case under false pretenses and when his father finds out, he slaps him and berates him.

Eventually the bodies are found on the ice, frozen together, naked and showing signs of self-harm. Their clothes are found several feet away, neatly folded. The local authority from Anchorage (Christopher Eccleston) shows up and claims jurisdiction. Danvers refuses to bend, reads the regulations and wants the body thawed. She then takes over the ice rink for it to happen.

Navarro continues to pursue the case starting by talking to the woman who found them (Shaw). We saw her see a ghost lead her on to the ice, something she was very aware of and tells Navarro when she sees her. She is quite open when it comes to discussing both the dead and the spiritual. Both Danvers and Navarro realize there is a link between a tattoo on the body and one that one the coat of one of the victims. Clarke was that man, and he was apparently having an affair with her.

All of this, naturally, is discussed with the tenor we get with every season of True Detective. People speak in portentous tones about the afterlife, there are hints of supernatural as well as the discussion of the dead. And it is this, more than anything, that convinces me that all of the changes that have made are merely window dressing for the same old story the show has been telling for ten years.

Because while the climate and genders for the leads have been reversed, nothing is fundamentally different. Danvers and Navarro were formerly allies who clashed on an old investigation and are no longer speaking. Both women have sex with whoever they want indiscriminately; Danvers has sex with the Anchorage chief who was her old boss and, surprise, surprise, was her ex-husband. Both Navarro and Danvers are haunted by traumas from their past; Navarro is deeply spiritual, Danvers ruthlessly agnostic. Both are hated throughout their community – and it has nothing to do with toxic masculinity, the women hate Danvers as much as the men do. Danvers has a daughter who is a lesbian and also indigenous and has no use for her wanting to embrace her native culture. She treats her detectives as if they were disposable: Navarro has the habits that Powell did, and it’s clear that she is just as willing to use him up as it sees fit. If you’re going to change True Detective, you have to do more than just flip the genders of the protagonists to cure the problem: psychologically and mentally, they are essentially the same as, well, every male protagonist of True Detective.

Worse still is the maddening decision to argue that there is something spiritual and supernatural around all of the killings. We’ve seen since the first season: we’re showing a series of murders with the bodies positioned a certain way, there’s imagery that seems to indicate something bigger is at play, and there is discussion about subjects about bigger forces and the universe. And inevitably it is revealed that the killings are the subject of something far more mundane that, at the end of the day, is not merely anticlimactic but something the writers are barely interested in. The most I’m willing to say about Night Country is at least it’s willing to hedge its bets: there is discussion about not mistaking mental health for the supernatural and there is a very real possibility the killer is human and has merely gone insane. But that doesn’t change the fact that all of this is still telling a very long story about what could be solved in forty-five minutes on CSI.

And hell, we even have the presence of a famous actor around the same time they are competing for an Oscar and hoping to win an Emmy. Now with Foster it may be a different story – she already has two Oscars and the odds of her getting a third for Nyad are remote. There’s also the fact that Foster is at least doing more of a tweaking of her most famous character Clarice Starling and that she has been playing variations on this kind of character for a very long time. And because Foster is incapable of giving a bad performance and frequently being able to raise subpar material above the standards, she is by far the best thing about Night Country.

But again, how is that different from any previous season? Even the best seasons of True Detective asked you take the extraordinary acting above writing that involved deep-sounding dialogue surrounding a ritualistic mystery. At this point, I would be asking for more from True Detective, but Night Country essentially argues that no matter how much you changed the writers or leads, it has the same problem.

It doesn’t help that this is also the tenth anniversary of Fargo which is an infinitely better anthology series with far greater rewards then just being about a single crime. Fargo finished its fifth season the same week Night Country premiered and has already been nominated for Best Limited Series by the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards. The great thing about Fargo is that Noah Hawley uses the story of a procedural to never tell the same story twice. There have been links between individual seasons (genuine ones, not Easter eggs like the kinds we sometimes get in True Detective) but each time Hawley and the wonderful casts he assembles are using crime to tell far larger stories about place, time, and the rise and fall of different elements not only of crime but society. He also leans more into the mystical in a way True Detective never does but he doesn’t necessarily bother with a logical or illogical explanation. But because this is the atmosphere of Fargo that weirdness is part of the point and charm.

Night Country, by contrast, continues the horrible condition of wanting to be about grand themes but rather just telling a mundane procedural. It doesn’t bother me so much that Lopez, like Pizzolato, won’t pick a lane but that she thinks this is one.

As the new season begins after the long night of the Hollywood strikes I am now with the benefit of having more choices of what to watch on Sunday nights. My first choice will be Monsieur Spade and then I will follow up with the promising Showtime series The Women in the Wall (watch this space for the review). As for Night Country, I’ll DVR and watch it with the hope that their might be some long-term improvements but I’m about as optimistic about that as, well, almost all of the characters in True Detective. Jodie Foster is magnificent to be sure, but after ten years of this, I think I deserve more than that in my Peak TV, I guess when it comes to the idea True Detective can change,  the show’s whole universe is, to paraphrase Rust Cohle, just one big ghetto. And I don’t have to spend time in it than I have too.

My score: 2.5 stars.