‘True Detective’ returns strong
Stephen Dorff and Mahershala Ali investigate a case of two missing children in the third season
When the first season of HBO’s True Detective arrived in 2014, it was as praised and argued over as any series in television’s increasingly self-conscious New Golden/Platinum Age.
Starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as an odder-than-usual odd couple of Louisiana policemen chasing an old case into the present, it was brilliant and maddening and new in ways that seem much less new now. In the years since, we have become accustomed to slow-building television, anthologies and the notion that an entire series might be written or directed by a single person — crime novelist Nic Pizzolatto and Beasts of No Nation director Cary Joji Fukunaga, respectively in this case.
A second season the following year, written almost wholly by Pizzolatto with a rotating crew of directors, was set in a fictional Southern California town and starred Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch.
Once again, the series is mainly Pizzolatto’s work, with Deadwood creator David Milch co-writing one episode and Graham Gordy, another.
Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali, the series’ first black lead) and Roland West (Stephen Dorff) are the partnered cops here, Arkansas state police detectives. Both are Vietnam vets. Roland is more relaxed, though not exactly well-adjusted. Wayne, who developed preternatural tracking skills through his wartime speciality — “long range reconnaissance” — has a stricter code. But bucking a tradition in crime fiction, they are generally in sync.
Like the first season, the story runs in multiple timelines. In 1980, the two are investigating the disappearance of a young brother and sister in a northwest Arkansas small town. In 1990, the case has been reopened, and they become partners again.
As before, the series looks good, with place and atmosphere well evoked and it moves slowly. It remains a talky show, if a less self-consciously eloquent one; Wayne is a man of few words and Roland only a few more.
It’s an ambitious and imperfect work, beautiful and corny, believable and less believable by turns. I recommend it, with advisories. The mere fact that it involves missing children makes it hard to watch. Though there are moments of sweetness, there isn’t much in the way of humour; nothing like the weird comic edge of McConaughey and Harrelson’s philosophical double act in season one.
What’s most compelling, and touching, in True Detective are these elements of memory and time, how it moves on and stands still.
Ali, especially, with the help of some crack make-up and hair people, is persuasive as Wayne across a span of 35 years, living in the present and in an incomplete past that is running away from him even as he runs toward it.
It’s an ambitious and imperfect work, beautiful and corny, believable and less believable by turns. I recommend it, with advisories.