True Detective Season 2 ended yesterday with an epic 1.5 hour long slog through to the finish line. It felt like a fish out of the water struggling to crawl back to the ocean. By now the groans of disappointment are loud and universal, so what the heck went wrong this season? Listed below are five things:
1. Bigger Is Not Equal to Better
The first season of True Detective was already jam packed with characters, with the Tuttle and the Childress clans being discussed in the backdrop of the plot. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolato’s mission for S2 was to go bigger, and unfortunately that meant packing in even more characters without properly developing them. His creative meeting boiled down to ‘Last time we had two detectives, so this time we have three! One villain last time, so five this time!’ The stakes or the emotions, or dare I say the horror should have gone bigger, instead the number of talking heads did. And they all droned on endlessly until the audience stopped giving a damn. Also, like S1 most of the key characters were hardly on camera – they were just spoken of, rather than shown in the foreground.
2. First Draft Was the Final Draft
When Pizzolatto’s script for the Season 1 was greenlit and finally shot, it would have undergone years of development. The finished product looked like it had been polished many times to render its sheen. It was probably the 20th draft of the script that made it to the screen.
For Season 2, there was hardly any time. Pizzolatto began work only after S1 scored huge ratings. S2 was fast tracked, and HBO had to broadcast the show exactly a year after S1. The lack of time devoted to development is obvious – plot threads dangle like broken teeth, dialogue was superficial – as if written hurriedly under a marijuana haze. There was no clear direction for the show to take – it was a mystery thriller, but also a pulp noir, but also a heavy set love story, it was all of those things but ultimately none of those things. It was the first draft of the script that was eventually shot. It’s also why the characters were inconsistent – one moment they were super-geniuses while the next they were idiots without any rational thought process. Colin Farrell’s Velcoro first exterminating people like a SWAT specialist and then being unable to dodge a following car and dying alone in the woods is just one of the many examples of inconsistency.
3. The Mystery was Lame, the Reveal Lamer
For a show called True Detective, there was very little detective work going on in this season, despite three people assigned to investigate. And that was only because the murder mystery and the conspiracy behind it did not carry any weight. S1 was about existential angst, betrayal, redemption, cult, voodoo, murder, love, incest, bromance, time, space, drugs, loss and more. S2 is about diamonds stolen twenty years ago. The murder of Ben Caspere is made to look like a cult killing, and the reveal was not only anticlimactic but also frustratingly lame. Not to mention how the detectives catch the killer – Velcoro just randomly has an epiphany that a photographer on the set of a movie whom he had spoken to for two seconds several weeks ago, could be one of the twins whose parents were killed by three corrupt cops twenty years ago, to steal diamonds. This is the baap of all contrivances.
4. The Weight of Originality
Pizzolatto was under pressure to deliver something original this time. Some of McConaughey’s Nietzsche like monologues in the S1 were lifted from Thomas Ligotti’s book The Conspiracy Against The Human Race, and various other sources. Pizzolatto could not afford to repeat such inspiration this time, and the lack of interesting dialogue this season kind of exposes his limitations as a writer. It also exposes his pigheadedness seeing as he did not allow other writers to chime in – he alone wanted to be the showrunner. This season desperately needed fresh additional writing talent, and not the total creative freedom that Pizzolatto was bestowed.
5. The Awful Casting
No matter how apologetic one is towards Vince Vaughn, Taylor Kitsch and Rachel McAdams, it’s impossible to put them in the same league as McConaughey and Harrelson. These people weren’t cast because of their acting skills, they were cast because they are recognizable faces. They are movie stars made to appear in a TV show as a marketing decision rather than a creative one. Which is why in the show it feels like these people are ‘pretending to be True Detective characters’, than actually being them. Vaughn always glowers, McAdams always purses her lips, Kitsch always looks befuddled – they’re all one note from start to end. Which is also why it hardly matters when these characters meet their demise.
McConaughey and Harrellson were also cast for marketing purposes, but they were directed by Cary Fukunaga who squeezed out their career best performances. Colin Farrell was the only one in the whole season who had some range and ultimately made a lasting impression. He was so good he made butt f***ing a man with the headless corpse of his wife sound funny. Bring him back in Season 3.