Edited by Robert Beach
Follow-ups are always
difficult. It’s a rule of life that a 2nd installment of
anything is severely hit or miss. The general logic behind this is sequels
are faced with a number of difficult choices: whether to provide more of the
same or take a different approach, for instance.
Even if the creators
decide to simply produce more of what’s already proven successful, there’s the
question of what worked so well in the original piece. A story is made up
of so many individual parts it can be hard to pinpoint the exact aspects of it
that resonates with an audience. This is where True Detective season
2 goes horrible, terribly, catastrophically wrong.
The Rise of True Detective
In case you’ve managed
to avoid it, True Detective was a surprise hit anthology crime
show from early 2014. Pretty much no one had heard of the HBO series
before it launched, and even when it started, there was very little fanfare; however,
after around 3 episodes, internet buzz and word of mouth helped generate a
major audience for the series and the ratings saw a continual climb. By
the time the season finale came around, True Detective was a
name show for a lot of folks, especially critics. It’s easy to see why
season 1 was such a success: a unique blend of horror elements and
cinematography with a solid script that balanced character drama with a more
real-life mystery.
The show’s success
didn’t go unnoticed by HBO, who have been eager for new powerhouse franchises
for a while now. For season 2, True Detective went much,
much bigger. Casting Collin Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and
Taylor Kitsch in 4 lead roles, the show beefed up the size of its story and was
moved to a summer release date as part of the rise of blockbuster TV. The
new setting was grounded in central California while the plot revolved around
the fictional corrupt city of Vinci and relating heavily to the state-wide,
high-speed rail. The show was all set to focus on every level of crime and
punishment in California: from state police down to corrupt officials to
criminals and gangsters with a keen focus on corruption, both systemic and
personal. Everything was set for a thrilling new season that would take
things bigger and bolder.
True Detective Season 1 vs 2
Obviously, that didn’t
happen. Despite a lot of strong moments sprinkled over the course of
the season, True Detective season 2 never managed to reach the
heights of season 1. The show bogged down under poor pacing, clunky
dialogue, a curious thematic emptiness, and a lot of major exposition
problems. The show’s biggest issue this season is actually pretty simple: it’s
not written as a TV show, it’s written as a novel.
Season 1 of True
Detective was very much grounded in the mechanics of television,
relying heavily on the performance of the actors and the cinematography to tell
the story. Elements like the show’s iconic long, unbroken, monologues from
Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey serve as a perfect chance for the
actors to give a powerhouse, unbroken performance. At the same time, Cary
Fukunaga’s cinematography was able to speak volumes without a single word,
crafting a narrative solely through creepy and unnerving visuals.
Novelizing a TV Series
Season 2 of True
Detective is constructed much more around dialogue and plot points as
the show’s only narrative currency. Rather than providing the actors space
to give a defined performance, the emphasis is much more on dialogue as a form
of exposition. In a novel, dialogue predominately serves the purpose of
providing narrative momentum because the job of character development can be
taken care of elsewhere. A character’s voice in a novel is still unique,
but they can convey their thoughts and identity through an inner monologue or
an omniscient narrator; the dialogue ends up ancillary to this task.
In a TV show or a film,
where there is no narrator or internal monologue, the dialogue is the only way
to learn about these characters. That’s why so often the actors in season
2 are straining against their part. We know the details of characters like
Colin Farrell’s Ray Velcoro; we know the plot points of his life, but as a man,
he’s ultimately a major cipher. The only reason he ends up more likable are
the glimmers of personality that shine through in Colin Farrell’s performance. We
don’t so much care about the character as the man behind it.
That’s a dynamic that
can work in cases where a character is deliberately left weak for an actor to
embody like most Jason Statham roles. Here, Velcoro is meant to be a
fully realized character; although, there’s no depth to the detail, no emotion
to all the information, no room for the actors to give a performance, just the
writing relying on information.
Conspiracies and Half-Baked Subplots
This same problem
extends to the show’s crushingly dense amount of vaguely connected conspiracy
plots and the problems with detail that plague the rest of the season. For
instance, this season relied heavily on a large number of players smashed
together for their various conspiracies but never managed to set names to
faces. In a novel, simply throwing around character names like Holloway or
Geldoff would be fine because a name is all they are in a novel. In a
show, unless a character is firmly introduced to the audience alongside their
name viewers will be stranded playing “Guess who” over all the unconnected
names being thrown about.
It’s the same with the 5
central conspiracies of the season. In a book, having so much plot would be a
lot more manageable, but in an 8-episode show, it all ends up crushed together. It
doesn’t help that the show’s pacing with the conspiracies is decidedly off,
over-explaining stuff like the high-speed rail conspiracy far too early while
bringing up a diamond heist subplot infinitely too late in the game. The
season ends up with so many narrative balls in the air that none of them feel
well developed or interesting because they’re either too simplistic,
underdeveloped, or clichéd to be engaging.
A very good example of
this is the strangely interwoven plot trinity of the high-speed railway
conspiracy, the secret sex party conspiracy, and the secret war being waged
against Vince Vaughn’s gangster character Frank Semyon. The high-speed
railway plot is essentially every land grab plot of driving down land value to
buy it cheap before it becomes worth millions, basically the same scheme as Lex
Luthor in Superman. It’s a clichéd plot so tired it’s
downright exhausted; worse, it’s so obvious there was almost no real mystery to
it.
Bipolar Use of Casper
In season 1, the whole
show was grounded in a single murder mystery that expanded into multiple
murders and a conspiracy to conceal said murders. Even though the crimes
being investigate grew wider in breadth, the emphasis remained on the central
murder as the lynch pin of all the conspiracies. In season 2,
however, the murder of corrupt city planner Casper ended up almost completely
disconnected to the other central conspiracies. Casper had been involved
in some of the various conspiracies, but his death remained separate from
almost all of them. This is a huge problem; it completely deflates the
importance and meaning behind the inciting crime.
That wouldn’t be so bad
if Casper’s death wasn’t kept in focus, yet the show keeps pulling back to it,
unwilling to let it just fade into the background. As a result, the show
has to contrive conspiracy upon conspiracy to explain why Casper’s death is
related to the high-speed rail or the sex parties or Frank’s secret war. It
leaves the show a mess of disparate narrative pieces rather than a cohesive
whole.
Self-Definition as Theme
This wouldn’t be such a problem if thematically the season worked;
instead, the whole season’s themes of corruption and self-definition come off
curiously inert. Where season 1 of True
Detective was focused on using the breakdown of its investigation as a
window into the psychologically broken nature of both men, season 2 tried to
yoke all of its characters together through theme. All the leads of season
2 are connected through a clash between a past corruption and current
self-definition.
Frank is corrupted by his criminal past and attempts to redefine himself as a legitimate businessman; meanwhile, Ray is corrupted by his murder of his wife’s rapist and attempts to redefine himself as a good cop. Rachel McAdams’ Ani Bezzerides is corrupted by childhood trauma and attempts to redefine herself now through strength and deadliness. Taylor Kitsch’s Paul Woodrugh feels corrupted by his love affair with a fellow male soldier in Iraq and attempts to redefine himself as a straight family man.
This theme even extends
to the physical world as a tricky reworking of season 1’s emphasis on violent
crime being carved across the landscape. The land of the high-speed rail
has been literally poisoned with heavy metals and waste disposal. It’s
been corrupted and rendered infertile, unable to continue in its previous
manner and left with redefinition as the only useful option.
The problem is despite
all these thematic parallels, none of it actually means anything. There’s
no greater realization made about corruption or self-definition or redemption,
it’s all just so much noise. The closest thing there is to a central
conclusion to be made is that sometimes you can change and sometimes you can’t
and there’s really no way to tell the two apart.
Plot Over People
Season 1 didn’t really
have much of a conclusion to make either about its swirling subtext gumbo of
nihilism and toxic masculinity, but that season could fall back on the pulpy,
horror-infused artifice of the show as the central focus. In season 2, the
unique blend of horror iconography and darkness with a ‘50s hardboiled pulp
aesthetic has been traded for a slick, urban crime aesthetic. This was
really the final nail in season 2’s coffin.
Shifting the emphasis
from artifice to depth without actually imbuing the story with meaning just
crippled the entire season. Worst of all, it changed True
Detective into a completely different show. Season 1 worked
because it was a show about clashing personalities in a creepy little pocket of
failed Americana brimming with Southern fried horror. Season 2 is about
several seemingly disconnected characters trying to survive and do well in a
corrupt urban world; someone already made that show, and it was called The
Shield. No one was tuning into True Detective to see
a technically inept reinvention of The Shield.
A Failure We Want
Even with 3 pages of an
exhaustive breakdown of why True Detective Season 2 doesn’t
work, I’m still hopeful for a 3rd season. It’s worth
noting that all the big problems with this season are either technical, which
can be polished to perfection, or issues of ambition. True
Detective season 2 easily could’ve just been season 1 again with new
actors, though they really did try for something bigger and bolder and
different with this season. Obviously, they didn’t make those changes well
and there were a lot of mistakes, yet none of those mistakes came from
cowardice or lack of imagination.
A show that fails from
taking risks is infinitely preferable to a show that plays it safe and
stagnates. Finally, season 2 is simply the place where mistakes are
made. Second installments are essentially a test kitchen to experiment
with new ideas in order to see what made people gravitate to the show in the
first place. That’s what this season was more than anything else, a failed
experiment and the only way to handle it is to not let this failure corrupt the
show overall and just move forward.
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