A couple of
weeks ago, in what was a long overview of True Detective I reached the
conclusion that the critically acclaimed first season was never as remarkable
as millions of fans have thought for over a decade, that Night Country was
not particularly a good installment of it and that, having watched the first
two episodes, I had no particular desire to finish it all that quickly. As I
mentioned there are very better procedurals on Sundays at 9pm anyway and after
two episodes of Monsieur Spade and The Woman In The Wall, it’s
clear the former is more fun and the latter more layered than Night Country is.
My plan, which I have every intention of following through on, is to DVR the remaining
episodes and at some point when time permits it watch the remaining four
episodes, not anticipating much. So when I say I have no dog in the fight over
whether Night Country is a masterpiece or an offense to fans of the original,
I think you can believe me.
That does not
mean I’m unaware of the war that has been being fought among critics, fans and right
now the two creative forces behind the show about whether Night Country is
any good. The critical response I’ve read has been mixed. The reviews have been
favorable by some, but the advance reviews I’ve seen online have considered it
basically a mediocrity which would fit in with the two episodes I saw. However
in the last few weeks Nic Pizzolato, the creator of the first three seasons and
Issa Lopez, who created Night Country have begun an argument about Night
Country that basically sums up the opposing points of views.
Pizzolato, who
is credited as a producer of Night Country but has no association with
it, has vocally admonished Lopez for utilizing so many Easter eggs from Season
1 in Night Country, something that many critics and even fans have considered a
distraction from what is working about this version. Lopez, by contrast, has argued
that fans of the original series are ‘review bombing’ the show on Rotten
Tomatoes out of a combination of toxic masculinity and the internet attitude towards
making something they consider precious ‘woke’.
I will grant you I haven’t watched the last
two episodes of the show to know how much of these criticisms are merited.
However, as someone who has a certain level of detachment – something that is a
commonality between every character on True Detective – I think I can
make some observations on this argument.
First of all, if
you are a reader of my column you know that I vehemently loathe even the concept
of review bombing. The rush to judgment to destroy a work of art because the too-often
juvenile mindset of the internet argues that any change to something that they
consider ‘sacred’ appalls me as a critic. Far too often this judgment is made
before the series even airs a single episode: I saw it done with the reboot of The
Wonder Years, the reimagining of Quantum Leap and most recently the
prequel of Sexy Beast. If nothing else, these arguments make the jobs of
critics like myself so much harder; most of these ‘critics’ will never even
watch an episode of these series: the mere idea of it is enough to cause them
to reach a certain level of insanity far disproportionate to the nature of the
offense.
At the very least they should watch an episode
before they decide it deserves their loathing and in the case of Night
Country that actually seems to have been what’s happening. Pizzolato has
admitted the point when he says the easter eggs are distracting. That said, I’m
not entirely certain he’s an unbiased observer when it comes to this. It’s not
clear what connection, if any, Pizzolato actually has to the fourth season of
the show. The series is based on True Detective as opposed to
being part of the universe, which may very well mean he had nothing to do with
any part of its production. He may be offended that Lopez is taking liberties
with his series that he did not give permission for, and that may be a
legitimate complaint. But considering the level of criticism that has been
lobbed against his version of the series for the levels of misogyny in it as
well as the more than five years between the third season and the fourth, we
can’t say for sure whether he was fired from the show he created.
That deals with
Pizzolato’s perspective. Now let’s move on to Lopez’s.
There’s a very
good argument that if this show had just been called Night Country Lopez
might never have been able to get it sold, much less get the kind of viewership
that she and her fans are crowing about. Having seen the first two episodes,
had it had no connection to True Detective, there wouldn’t have been
much to recommend it to me save the presence of Jodie Foster. I admit the idea
of setting a show in Alaska in the middle of perpetual night has elements of a
mystery that is interesting, as well as the fact that the two detective investigating
the crime are female. But the basic setup is not far removed from say, Mare of
Easttown and I didn’t have much of a reason to watch that series either. (My
mistake I admit.) The only reason I paid attention to this show was because it
was labeled True Detective. And Lopez has to know that’s why 2.5 to 3
million people are watching it.
Furthermore if
Lopez wanted to make Night Country her own, she could have done it by
telling her own story. There was absolutely no need to put in the symbols that
represented ‘The Yellow King’, the fact that the Tuttles are involved or that Rust
Cohle’s father might have originally lived in Ennis if she was devoted to
telling her own mystery that was merely ‘based on True Detective’. She
didn’t need to put in the Easter eggs and she certainly could have spent the
leadup to Night Country by saying this was an independent story. Her
decision to put the Easter eggs in was as much a lure to the fandom of True
Detective as the references to the source material has been for House of
The Dragon and The Last of Us. Indeed, many of them were
deliberately put in the trailers for this version.
Lopez spent a
lot of time and energy luring an audience in with links to the first season. In
my opinion, her statements saying that the former fans of the series are now
review bombing the show because they are offended by it has a hypocrisy that
most of these reimagined versions do not. She went out of her way to try and
get them on the hook and now she and her ilk are repudiating them because they find
it offensive.
In my opinion
this is much ado about nothing because if you’re a fan of True Detective, you
are getting exactly what you expect from Night Country: a lot of great
atmosphere, apparent philosophic behavior, a ritualistic and brutal murder, a
toxic relationship between the two lead detectives based on an event in the
past, a prominent set of two performers at the start, and a sense of something
greater and supernatural that at the end of the day will just lead to something
anticlimactic. The argument between fans of Pizzolato’s work and Lopez’s
version truly goes to show how hollow so many of these internet squabbles really
are: both sides are utterly convinced the other is destroying something
brilliant when there was nothing great in the original to be ruined and there
isn’t anything that great in the remake. In this case it’s about a prestige TV
show rather than a comic book character or a sci-fi franchise, but its
fundamentally a wasted dispute because both sides are so dug in on their
divides, they refuse to even admit there was nothing that great about their story
in the first place.
While I may lean
closer to Pizzolato’s side than Lopez’s in the argument about Night Country,
ultimately I can’t bring myself to care either way. True Detective is,
at least for me, as unimportant to me as Star Trek or Star Wars, and
I care as much about how much Night Country is affecting the ‘franchise’
as I do about Discovery or Ashoka doing to theirs. For the next
few weeks I will be finishing up the series I mentioned and waiting for The
Regime to debut on – that actually looks original and fun, something
I can not say for any version of True Detective, past or present.
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