Imperfect, but well-made cop story
We could all use a little distance from True Detective’s first season. Perhaps you found the HBO series to be the most brilliant TVwatching experience you’ve had in some time. Others couldn’t help but notice that, in spite of some good acting and impressive technical moves, True Detective had some undermining flaws, particularly when it came to the writing.
More than a year later, as promised, creator/writer Nic Pizzolatto has relocated True Detective’s setting from Louisiana to Southern California and, in tonight’s premiere, readies us for a different mystery that involves a trio of detectives who are just as haunted and damaged as either Mathew McConaughey’s Cohle or Woody Harrelson’s Detective Marty Hart.
It’s clear from the first new episode (there are eight again this season) that True Detective is taking full advantage of the opportunity provided by the show’s anthology format to move on and remedy some of Season 1’s problems — or, at the very least, head some of its critics off at the pass. The anthology concept can work wonders when it comes to contained stories; FX’s American Horror Story sets a refreshing example, adding to it by drawing on a repertoire of players.
Which may be a long way of telling you that True Detective’s second go-around benefits greatly from a restart.
The first season’s three-track chronology structure (flashing back and among 1995, 2002 and 2012, which was smartly executed) appears to be gone, except for the occasional depiction of a memory. Sceptics might notice that Pizzolatto has learnt to whittle down his prose a bit, even though it’s still easy to discern scenes where what’s on the page will simply come off as pretentious on the screen.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in some early, very Pizzolatto-esque monologues from one Frank Semyon, a Southland mobster played by Vince Vaughn. Having built his empire in the underworld, Frank has risked his fortune on a somewhat more legitimate, but still under-the-table scheme: buying his way into the unfathomably lucrative plan to develop land along a proposed high-speed rail line through California.
Viewers may flag a bit when they discover that True Detective is now asking them to follow its rather complex look at corruption in state and municipal politics, set mainly in a fictional city called Vinci.
Vince Vaughn
Within sight of downtown Los Angeles, Vinci is an industrial mess of refineries, plants, transfer stations and a casino. Though it has only 95 permanent residents, thousands of workers come and go every day. Vinci has a police department and a bureaucracy including a dirty mayor. The entire operation seems built on graft, and it is here where Frank has thrived.
Two events, however, are thwarting Frank’s scheme to move up and out: The big local paper has started running an eightpart series on Vinci’s civic corruption and the city manager has gone missing, just as he was supposed to be moving Frank’s fortune into the hands of railway developers.
Then it gets more convoluted. A California Highway Patrol officer, Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), discovers the missing city manager’s corpse at a pullout on the Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura County, which falls in the jurisdiction of Detective Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams).
The state decides that the murder investigation will be handled by three agencies: Woodrugh will investigate on behalf of the state; Bezzerides will investigate the case for the county. Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) of the Vinci Police Department is also assigned to the case.
As with last season, the case that the detectives are trying to solve is secondary. True Detective is a show about detectives. Together, Velcoro, Bezzerides and Woodrugh are a psychological minefield: Bezzerides grew up in a New Age movement centred on a mindfulness guru who happens to be her father; now she’s an emotional cipher who arms herself to the teeth with hidden knives — and we’re clearly meant to wonder why. Woodrugh, whose military service led to working as a Blackwater-style mercenary, has posttraumatic stress disorder.
There is something still lugubrious and overwrought about True Detective, but there’s also a mesmerising style to it — it’s imperfect, but well made.