Season 3 of True Detective takes a new angle
Latest True Detective tells story from point of view of police officer in his 30s, 40s and 70s
In just two seasons, HBO’s True Detective has established a signature brand: dark criminal mysteries that explore the psyches of obsessive investigators who can’t let them go.
But Season 3 (the two-hour première is tonight at 9), which centres on an Arkansas state police detective (Mahershala Ali) searching for two missing children, offers a new ingredient: hope. “There’s a light about this season,” especially in later episodes,” says Ali, 44, who plays investigator Wayne Hays at three points in his life.
Series creator Nic Pizzolatto agrees. “I’m not even sure this is properly noir, given where it goes.”
Don’t worry. True Detective isn’t turning into a rom-com. There’s still brooding atmosphere, a tragic crime, tangential casualties and collateral psychological damage to all who come into contact with the initial crime and investigation.
“It’s not the kind of show where you watch five episodes in a single day,” says Ali, an Oscar winner for 2016’s Moonlight who won a Golden Globe Sunday for his performance in Green Book.
Season 3 arrives with much anticipation, partly because of the roller-coaster reaction to the first two editions. The 2014 inaugural effort, which featured Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson pursuing a serial killer over two decades through the Louisiana bayou, became an award-winning phenomenon.
With the bar set so high, many were disappointed in 2015’s Season 2, which starred Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch as police officers and Vince Vaughn as a bad guy, all following the trail left by a corrupt city manager’s death through dreary stretches of Los Angeles.
Pizzolatto, who wrote most of the eight episodes and makes his directing debut, acknowledges the criticism. “I just try to keep getting better at what I do and [move] forward, and substantive criticism is a big part of that.”
That reflection influenced Season 3. “I wanted something that was less sensationalistically violent and more closely tied to the idea of family, because so much of this case would ultimately impact [Hays’] family and haunt the family in its own way,” he says.
As with Season 1, the new edition juggles timelines, but this time it’s three, not two, and is “a much more complicated structural thing,” says Pizzolatto, who attended graduate school in Arkansas and likes setting the story in “a less-known part of the country.”
We meet 30-something investigator Hays in 1980 as he and partner Roland West (Stephen Dorff) investigate the disappearance of two children who never come back from a bike ride. It finds him again in 1990 as new information emerges about the puzzling crime, and he returns in 2015 as an aging man struggling with memory loss who reconsiders the investigation and its effect on his life as a documentary filmmaker digs into the infamous crime.
The series explores the professional and personal bond between Hays and West, able investigators and decent men who contend with angry, aggrieved parents (Scoot McNairy and Mamie Gummer); suspects who are guilty of other crimes or easy scapegoats; and ambitious state politicians.
Ali sees Hays, a Vietnam veteran who became an expert tracker in Southeast Asian jungles, as essentially three characters.
“Where he’s at mentally is so different when he’s in his 70s than in his 30s and 40s,” says the actor, who spent as much as five hours in makeup to transform into the septuagenarian. But the changes the man undergoes as he ages go beyond physical appearance.
“As he ages and his mind begins to deteriorate, his heart opens and he becomes more affectionate, more emotional, more loving,” Ali says.
Hays meets the woman who eventually becomes his wife, schoolteacher and aspiring writer Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo, Selma). Later, she writes a book about the crime, the investigation and its effect on their family, much to his dismay.
Ejogo finds Amelia an intriguing character who faced career barriers as a woman in that era. Amelia is “an artist, an intellectual [who] has aspirations to be something that may be a little outside her purview as a woman of the ’80s, doing her best to be the mother and the housewife but with bigger ambitions,” she says.
And she has an independence that elevates the character above the stereotypical role of supportive wife, Ejogo says.
The actors praise Pizzolatto’s skill in portraying characters of different races, ages and time periods in a way that resonates for contemporary viewers far from northwest Arkansas, where the season was filmed.
Ultimately, Season 3 is as much an investigation of Hays as it is of a puzzling crime, Pizzolatto says. “This one was the desire to tell a man’s life story in the form of a detective story, and the idea that if he’s losing [his memories] near the end of his life, then who he is becomes the mystery to himself.”