National Post (National Edition)
Season 3 of True Detective isn’t just familiar — it’s unoriginal.
IF YOU SCORE SEASON 3 OF SERIES ON ORIGINALITY, IT FAILS ON TWO COUNTS
True Detective Season 1 told us that time is a flat circle. True Detective Season 3 proves it. How many ways does the new season of HBO’S noir dirge return to familiar ground? The new case, like the first season’s, involves brooding Southern police and a horrifying crime against children. It takes place over three time periods, decades apart: an investigation, a re-investigation and a re-reinvestigation. We meet, again, hardscrabble poor folk and ambitious politicians; we find, again, creepy totems left at the crime scene and intimations of the occult.
Even the jokes repeat themselves. In Season 2, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) declared: “I support feminism. Mostly by having body issues.” Now, Roland West (Stephen Dorff ) tries to persuade his partner, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), to go to a brothel, saying: “I’m a feminist. They want to sell me a piece of ass, they’ve got the right.”
If you score True Detective Season 3 on originality, it fails — for repeating both its own history and the alreadydated cable genre of glum loners confronting the evils men do.
But if you treat it as a doover — if the series, like one of its haunted antiheroes, is retracing its steps to try to get things right — then it’s fine. Often quite good. Far more consistent.
Consistency, though, is an odd achievement for a series in which creator Nic Pizzolatto has insisted on swinging hard and hitting or missing big. Season 1 suffered from florid dialogue and stereotyped characters, especially the women — but when it connected, especially in Matthew Mcconaughey’s performance as haunted Rust Cohle, it was breathtaking. Season 2 was an admirable effort to change scenery, but it fell apart like a handful of California desert dust.
The new story returns to the South, a scrubby, hard-luck patch of Arkansas where partners Hays and West catch a case involving two children who disappeared on a bike ride. They crack the story open like a rotting log, and all manner of sadness scurries out: the local dead-enders who come under suspicion, the spiralling marriage of the children’s parents, Tom (Scoot Mcnairy) and Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer).
The season is nominally a story of partners, as if to keep up the tradition (and honour all those True Detective 3 internet memes). But the show really belongs to Ali (who just won a Golden Globe for Green Book), and he’s coolly magnetic.
As Hays in 1980, he has a dry, outsider affect; he served in Vietnam as a solo reconnaissance tracker; and as a black man in a largely white community, he stands apart. (The season’s exploration of race is intriguing but can feel forced, like the treatment of gender in Season 2.) In 2015, he is shaky and guarded, his memories splintered by dementia, as he tries to recall the case, and what may have gone wrong, for a Making a Murdererstyle documentary.
Of course, acting talent has never been the problem with True Detective, give or take a miscast Vince Vaughn. Overacting, or at least speechifying, is another matter, and both Ali and Pizzolatto (who writes the first five episodes, with an assist from David Milch of Deadwood in Episode 4) rein it in. The dialogue is more streamlined but keeps the leavening banter. (“You know how many times rats almost ended civilization?” Hays asks, in a tangent about vermin. “How many?” West answers. Pause. Distant stare. “I don’t know. At least two.”)
The dementia twist complicates a familiar story. We’re not so much flashing back and forward in time as joining the elder Hays — who hangs on to his memory by recording messages to himself — while he wanders about in his past. In the premiere episode, his 1980 self, while combing a house for clues, pauses, stares into the camera and says: “I’m ready to go now. I don’t want to be here.” They’re the words of the elder Hays, speaking to the film crew, overcome by the burden of his history.
But as the episodes wear on (the first two, evocatively directed by Jeremy Saulnier, aired Sunday night), they become more dour, and some of the old pretensions return. Hays is visited by a vision from the past that asks him: “Did you confuse reacting with feeling? Did you mistake compulsion for freedom?” Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil?
As compelling as Hays is, the season struggles with its supporting characters. Hays meets Amelia (Carmen Ejogo), a schoolteacher, in 1980; by 1990, they’re in a troubled marriage, and she has become a writer — her book on the missing-children case is considered a nonfiction classic by 2015. On paper, she’s an intriguing quasi-partner, a cerebral foil to the methodical Hays, but the script never develops her beyond an accessory to his story.
Her profession does, however, provide an excuse for some literary references, including a quote from a Robert Penn Warren poem that restates the show’s favourite theme: “The name of the story will be Time / But you must not pronounce its name.”
Which returns us to the beginning. Three seasons in, it’s clear what True Detective is: a platinum-cast anthology of moody crime stories in which familiar cops with familiar demons chase familiar devils. How many times do you really need to see it?
If your answer is “Once every couple of years,” then you’re in luck. This new True Detective should hold you over perfectly well, until time circles back once again.