Psychic pain still much in evidence

NEW YORK — True Detective could drive you to drink. Its second season (Sunday on HBO) arrives under cover of such darkness and psychic pain it seems to beg its audience to keep a bottle close by in unity with its harddrinking protagonists.

“You tying one on?” asks Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), an enterprising but beleaguered mobster, as he sits across from tormented detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) and watches him drain glass after glass of Johnnie Walker Blue.

“Not particularly,” grunts Velcoro, filling his glass again.

Of course, if you were to tie one on while watching True Detective you might realize you’re not the sort of high-functioning alcoholic represented by detective Velcoro, who serves the city of Vinci, a corrupt, industrially ravaged neighbour of Los Angeles. Or by Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), a hardbitten Ventura County sheriff’s detective.

Stick to soft drinks. True Detective demands a viewer’s full attention to absorb the puzzle taunting Ray and Ani, along with Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop, as well as Frank, whose make-or-break realestate deal is thrown in jeopardy by the murder of a Vinci city official.

That, in a nutshell, is what this season’s True Detective encompasses: law-enforcement officers and attempts to find answers to a crime whose search is complicated by ulterior motives.

How writer and creator Nic Pizzolatto has done it should become increasingly evident beyond the three episodes made available for preview. But he has clearly retained last year’s “weird fiction” atmospherics of the Louisiana bayou despite relocating to an urban world. In this factory-and-refinery-choked corner of L.A., the macabre is in evidence, even in the interstitial aerial shots of tangled freeways.