Warner Bros
Say what you will about Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, but it was one of the few shows on television (along with Noah Hawley’s Fargo) that had a real authorial voice at the helm and literary ambitions.
The first season caught lightning in a bottle with its eerie mix of Southern Gothic and hints of cosmic horror. I may be the only person on the planet who enjoys the second season just as much: an ode to California noir from The Big Sleep all the way down to Drive.
It featured four characters working out their own personal purgatories but lacked the drive of the first season’s serial killer menace.
I thought the series concluded nicely with the third season; an ode to time, friendship, and memory that was seen as both a return to form and a playful subversion of audience expectations.
After the third season series creator Pizzolatto left HBO, who had a streaming service to fill and an IP with name recognition so they retrofitted a pitch about a series of murders in remote Alaska into a new season of the crime anthology and attached Jodie Foster and boxer/actress Kali Reis as the new detective pairing and a wild high concept case of a group of arctic researchers left frozen out on the ice with vague ties to a cold case (pun intended) of a dead native girl.
It was a dish that should have stayed frozen.
Let’s get the good out of the way: technically the series is extremely well made. There’s so much intriguing detail about the way people live in such remote conditions and how it affects everything from the obvious (how they deal with thirty days of night) to the mundane (the limited availability of certain products). The show feels genuinely authentic in how it depicts life at the top of the world.
Jodie Foster is also very, very, good in her starring role as Chief Liz Danvers. She resists easy “girl power” cliches and builds a character with real dimension and flaws– a worthy protagonist for a series that once starred Rust Cohle and Marty Hart.
Unfortunately, she’s got no one to react to– Kali Reis is in over her head as Trooper Evangeline Navarro who is supposed to be a genderbent take on the obsessive detective but cannot find the subtler shades in her character and comes off as wooden and one-note. Even worse are the normally dependable John Hawkes (Deadwood) and Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who) who are locked into cartoonishly underwritten characters.
Worse than the performances are the scripts which seem to have proceeded from a cool premise, a team of arctic researchers who were scared out onto the ice and froze to death, with no idea how to create a rational explanation for it. The dawning horror you feel as the show spins its wheels and you realize they don’t actually have a convincing explanation for the premise is more visceral than any similar emotion the characters feel in the course of the story.
If that were not bad enough, the story raids the work of the departed Pizzolatto without any clear reason and with no satisfying pay off. Characters who are deeply unimportant to the overall story are revealed to have tangential relation to the detectives from Season 1, and the villains from that same season seem to have a tenuous link to the site of the murders here. None of this plays out to a satisfying conclusion, and the lifting was so egregious and pointless that it caused the famously irascible Pizzolatto to begin openly mocking the show on Instagram– a shocking development in contemporary Hollywood where everyone is terrified of being labeled “difficult.”
Extras include featurettes and episode recaps.
True Detective: Night Country is a cover band at the local bar– it’s a semi-competent writer aping a much more accomplished one’s voice instead of being herself and working her own material. It’s one of the best actors in Hollywood struggling in vain to hold up a sinking ship on her own. It’s a wonderful setting and an intriguing first act in search of a rewrite.
Not Recommended.
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