True Detective truly is, unlike the show’s endless parade of cadavers, impossible to kill. I had assumed HBO’s troubled anthology series was done for after its seriously disappointing second and third outings. But here it is back on our screens five years later in the form of True Detective: Night Country.
What is surprising about True Detective’s return is how much goodwill there seemed to be around the project, given the general dissipation of interest following the show’s drop-off in its last two outings. Much of this goodwill was directed at tweaks that had been made to a staid formula: much criticised series creator Nic Pizzolatto was out, replaced as showrunner by Mexican director Issa López; and a show that previously seemed to have little interest in female characters would now be led by two of them: a pair of fractious Alaska police officers played by Kali Reis and – in a real casting coup – Jodie Foster.
It probably helped too that López made positive noises about the new season being a “dark mirror” to the show’s still-loved, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson-starring first season, swapping clammy Louisiana for frigid, remote Alaska, but retaining its unsettling, occult-tinged mood. (There’s even a heavy hint that the father of Rust Cohle, McConaughey’s burnt out detective from season one, is a minor character in this latest series).
But as the series has gone on – we’re currently up to episode four of six – a backlash has built. Part of that, Lopez and plenty of others have suggested, is down to sexism: trolls deliberately pushing down the show’s review aggregate score because they don’t like the fact that the detectives are – gasp – women this time around. And its spotlighting of the plight of Indigenous Americans has naturally led to tedious claims of “wokery”. It probably hasn’t helped either that Pizzolatto himself, despite being listed as an exec producer, has been constantly cavilling about the show on social media.
Still, for all the culture war nonsense, I’m not sure all of the criticisms of Night Country are without merit. Personally, I’ve found it a bit of a mess, repeating some of the failings of seasons two and three and introducing a few of its own. Here’s where I think it’s gone wrong.
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It loses the thread of its central mystery
Night Country’s whodunnit is a doozy: a group of research station workers are found dead, naked and frozen into what internet wags are calling a “corpsicle”. And intriguingly this horrific scene seems to be tied to the murder of an Indigenous woman years earlier. Plenty to get stuck into there. But the show constantly seems to be undermining the wow factor of this mystery by stacking up new wrinkles and complications to it – most recently a blind German mapmaker, whose name was first uttered midway through episode four but now is seemingly central to the plot.
That, coupled with the shows many subplots – Russian mail order brides, conflicts over invasive mining – leads to a drain in momentum. There’s something unsatisfyingly halting and muddled about the progression of the case. The first rule of detective dramas is surely “get the detective bit of the drama right”.
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The supernatural elements jar
Where the first season of True Detective wore its supernatural tendencies lightly – occult insignia, creepy twig sculptures, references to the gothic horror of The King in Yellow – in Night Country, things are far more out in the open. Dead people roam the snowy wastes, as does a one-eyed polar bear bearing an uncanny resemblance to a stuffed toy Foster’s character owns, ghostly whispers can be heard in the distance. And of course the deaths of the research workers, discovered in a heap with self-inflicted bite marks, burnt eyes and symbols carved into foreheads, feel like the result of something otherwordly too.
In one sense, going full-bore supernatural in a series that has previously only hinted at it is an impressively daring move – and yet, it undermines the whodunnit aspect a little, not to mention jars with the heavier, more grounded aspects of the story (mental health crises, the legacy of colonialism). It’s a risk too – at some point you have to start trying to explain the unexplainable, and those explanations often fail to satisfy.
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Is it all a bit too grim?
The classic – and woefully misplaced – complaint about Succession was “why would anyone want to watch such horrible characters?” It’s an argument that’s always seemed daft to me – unlikeable characters have always existed in drama; who wants to watch a bunch of saints? – and, yet many of Night Country’s characters are unpleasant to the point of being unwatchable. Racism, toxic treatment of partners, physical abuse towards children are all identifiable traits … and that’s just in the protagonists!
It’s in keeping with a show that seems to wallow just a little too much in darkness, fitting though that is given it is set in eternal night. It’s an often despairingly grim series – and attempts to leaven the gloom with off-kilter humour (see Fiona Shaw’s daffy outsider character, parachuted in from a different, Twin Peaks-ier show) often fall flat. It’s a tough hang, as they say.
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The music – oh god, the music
A trivial criticism, perhaps, but the use of music on True Detective is absolutely maddening. It’s not necessarily the songs themselves – there’s some great glacial bangers on show, from Jon Hopkins to Mazzy Star to Billie Eilish – but rather how they’re used. Just as a scene is reaching its climax, suddenly a track comes crashing in like a bull in a Wedgwood factory to ruin the ambience. There’s seemingly no subtle mixing going on, just someone smashing the play button. This might be a minor concern in most cases, but for a show so focused on tone and ambience, it’s a real mood-killer. A bad year for TV show music so far!
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It’s weighed down by the brand
The biggest millstone round the neck of Night County might be the True Detective franchise itself. There are the bones of an interesting show here – a great premise, a tale about an overlooked corner of America and its unseen, undervalued inhabitants. But the show seems to have been roughly shoved into a template that it doesn’t quite fit. That’s understandable – Lopez has stated that the idea for the series emerged long before it had the True Detective name attached – but that name does lend certain expectations of the sort of show Night Country should and shouldn’t be.
As David Craig argues for the Radio Times, HBO did Lopez and Night Country a disservice by shoehorning it into one of their existing franchises. And what’s more I’m not sure it’s not even a franchise that people have a particular fondness for any more. Hopefully next time they’ll let their creators stand on their own two feet – and leave the True Detective brand dead and buried.
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