Late Thoughts on True Detective

I caught up on this late and want to talk a little about what worked for me and didn’t. SPOILERS after the cut.

The Good

The performances were just fantastic, surprising, intense, legitimate. And when MM’s face cracked open in the last episode when he was talking about his daughter—easily one of the best and most earned moments I’ve seen on television.

I loved how the show played with stereotypes about cops and the tropes of the tv detective so well. “You think you understand what you’re seeing? Think again.”

The Bad

The final episode was a huge let down for me narratively. Throughout the show, I’d been a bit vexed by the central mystery because it felt both implausible and familiar. As soon as we switched POV, essentially breaking with the close POV of the rest of the show (hints of this earlier, but this was a pretty radical shift), alarm bells went off and then it just got whacky. It was disgusting and creepy but in a way that felt so Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, etc. Scary inbred poorfolk! It felt cheap and it didn’t make a lot of sense. Yes this guy was scary and smart, but why would the state’s most wealthy and powerful be wrapped up with him. Because they’re a bunch of pedophiles? Because there’s some deeper power at work here?

The Ladies… Oh HBO, I’m getting really weary of this shit. I get that you’re portraying a masculine culture and that the victimization of women is a major element of that. I appreciate that we got to see the ladies being wild and angry and flawed in moments. But it’s really hard to give you the benefit of the doubt on any of that when you open with an ass shot, when pretty much every time a woman appears on screen she’s in a state of undress (dead or alive), and when Woody Harrelson’s three love interests are so gorgeous they look like they stepped out of an entirely different show—”We like gritty and real but just not that gritty and real!”