USA TODAY International Edition
1 troubled man moves in 3 eras in ‘True Detective’
LOS ANGELES – 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 (two-hour premiere Sunday, 9 EST/PST), which centers 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. “There’s a hope in this one that’s very different from the previous seasons.”
Series creator Nic Pizzolatto agrees. “I’m not even sure this is properly noir, given where it goes.”
Don’t worry. “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 found major disappointment 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 understood there was a lot of stuff in Season 2 that people hadn’t wanted to see based on Season 1, but I’m very proud of the work everybody did,” he says. “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 party of the country, a place that’s kind of mysterious.”
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 actors praise Pizzolatto’s skill in portraying characters of different races, ages and time periods in a way that resonates for contemporary viewers.
“What I love about Nic is he did the necessary homework that metabolized that research and put several wonderful characters down on a page,” Ali says. “
Ultimately, Season 3 becomes as much an investigation of Ali’s 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.”