True Detective Night Country

[smokingboot]

True Detective Season 1 remains my epitome of perfect television. There's nothing wrong with it. I love it so much I make sure never to rewatch it more than once a year so it doesn't lose its beauty. It was always going to be impossible to live up to, because at first you didn't know what the hell the show was; it subverted the police procedural formula, it brought two behemoths of charisma head to head, the writing, the music, the cinematography, all of it magnificent, plus we caught glimmers of Carcosa.

But glimmers are all there can ever be. I loved Season 2's hints of LA as a doorway to otherworld, to many otherworlds perhaps. There was so much there, it just never quite coalesced. Mahershala Ali's astonishing face is all I remember of Season 3. Beyond Season 1 the anthology has been a collection of not quites and almosts.

Re True Detective Season 4 the audience is prepped to expect something other, something major,and to be annoyed at lack of delivery. NC's already hitting the ominous hard, ghosts and spirit beasts etc; but Fortitude already did a lot of that. So what then? Off the top of my head, I am expecting a Dyatlov Pass type scenario, without avalanche, but with lots of Angry Land foreboding. If they are going to go Wendigo - Eilish's theme 'Bury a friend' talks about a 'cannibal class' - I hope they do it well. I'm hanging on in there for a while.

Comments

[bleodswean]

Right?!?!? TD S1 did something to me that no other "entertainment" ever has. I wrote fic like nothing I've written before or since. Scenes and dialogue live rent free in my head. It was PERFECTION.

S2 nope. I did enjoy S3 and the time jumps which were similar to S1.

What the hell is this, though? It felt tawdry and fake and flimsy. I love Foster but they aren't really using her for what she does, are they? I love the idea of fierce tattooed natives...but???? It's checking to many boxes and none of the boxes are stellar writing...

Yet.

[smokingboot]

Tawdry and fake and flimsy. Yes. It's trying so hard to haunt that it lacks any kind of intensity. A murmuration of birds almost make a sign in the sky, Rustin Cohle pauses, we feel it. Here we've got deer chucking themselves off cliffs, a portentous polar bear with a busted eye making its way through town, a ghost communicating via the medium of interpretative dance... but there's no intensity to any of it. The lead characters aren't big-broken the way Cohle and Hart are; they're ordinary women leading ordinary lives I guess, and maybe that's deliberate. Still, something is definitely lacking.
I am holding out for that yet.

[bleodswean]

Great observations! Have you seen Bryan Fuller's Hannibal? That's what it put me in mind of. Folks are saying The Thing. I'm not really getting that as much as I'm getting Hannibal. Everything feels so derivative these days.

[smokingboot]

The Thing?
That really would smack of desperate derivation. As you say, a lot of it around.
Interesting what you say about Hannibal , this never occurred to me, but now you mention it... I watched the first season, and loved its dream-like quality. Maybe that's what they are trying to reach here but with sharper pacing.