The best part about True Detective's first season was watching Woody Harrelson's Joe Six-Pack–type cop get all bug-eyed about the nihilistic shit Matthew McConaughey kept spewing.
Done well, this could be a more natural evolution than it might seem.
DRAFTSIGHT 2016 TV
So here's one way to break the unrelenting dourness of True Detective, which is easily one of the most self-serious crime shows in TV history: Pivot hard in the other direction. How many grim, self-serious crime dramas does a single network really need? Here’s another problem HBO faces: The Night Of, which blends equal parts True Detective and Serial, has essentially negated the need for the former.
Here, once again, True Detective could take a lesson from Fargo, whose first season's heroine was a cheery cop played by the virtually unknown Allison Tolman, and which stacked its supporting cast with against-type actors like Martin Freeman, Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, Keegan-Michael Key, and Jordan Peele-many of whom ended up turning in career-best work. It gets even worse as you scroll down the list of other actors who were reportedly considered for roles: Michael Fassbender, Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Brad Pitt…how many grim, grizzled white dudes does one cop show need? But who, in the end, did we get? Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, and Vince Vaughn-fine actors, but so obviously cut out for True Detective that it was hard not to yawn at the announcement. In retrospect, it's obvious that the best part of True Detective season two was #truedetectiveseasontwo-the viral hashtag that suggested an essentially limitless number of pairings of actors who could star in the second season. That would serve the dual purpose of answering some still-unexplained questions about what was really going on during those first two seasons, and make it feel like the time we spent trying to decipher season two wasn’t a complete waste.Ĭast some great actors-but not the ones we expect. Over at Vox, Todd VanDerWerff tossed out the possibility that season two's weird sex-murder cult might be connected to the weird sex-murder cult at the heart of season one-and while that theory didn't pan out, it's still a much better pitch than the season two we got.Īnd it could still totally work for season three! Just introduce a third weird sex-murder cult, and have them uncover two other wings, in Louisiana and California, as part of a massive underground Lovecraftian conspiracy gripping cities all over the United States. You could pair Pizzolatto up with a splashy, big-name crime writer like James Ellroy or Lawrence Block, or bring in an entire team of experienced TV writers, or both-anything to curb Pizzolatto's worst tics would be a big step forward.īefore it was completely clear that True Detective season two was going to be such a steaming turd, a number of TV critics came up with theories that might justify all that early narrative messiness. But there's a reason the vast majority of TV shows are crafted not by a single writer but by an entire writer's room-it's really hard to turn around that many episodes on the pace a TV show requires, and a natural, crowd-sourced vetting process ensures lines like "Maybe it's just a little too close to sucking a robot's dick" never make it to the screen. It's not that Pizzolatto should be replaced altogether True Detective is his brainchild, and he does have his strengths as a writer (even if most of the best bits from season one either flirted with plagiarism or stole outright). No, the problem was always Pizzolatto's writing, which-in both overarching plotting and moment-by-moment dialogue-was flimsier than anyone acknowledged in season one, and straight-up laughable in season two.