Night Country: Who Killed True Detective?

a few years ago I had the really novel idea that I was going to start a series on this channel where I reviewed bad movies totally untapped market right why didn't I run with that specifically it was going to be bad sequels either TV movie direct to video stuff or just otherwise forgotten movies the inaugural video was going to be about the awful American Psycho sequel starring munas and William Shatner but as I watched the movie it became clear that this was just some hack B movie that got turned into an American Psycho property mid-production and that pretty much took the wind out of my sales for the whole series it's a trash movie to be sure but picking it apart was only fun under the supposed pretense of what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish a followup to a refined critically acclaimed film so the fact that they probably were just aspiring for be Movie Trash made the whole operation feel a little pointless they more or less made the movie they wanted to make American Psycho 2's only real crime was winning the publicity Lottery being written in the right place and at the right time to be drawn out of a hat by EXE tives looking to cash in on their latest hit that's probably the only reason more than 500 people have seen this movie but it's also the primary reason for its noxious reputation anyway True Detective night country is the latest installment of hit TV show True Detective written and directed by Isa Lopez this marks the first season of the show to not be written by original Creator Nick pelato this disconnect has kicked up a bit of a [ __ ] storm between Lopez pelato fans of the show and HBO's upper management I'm not interested in anyone's Behavior here I sit before you today to talk about the contents of the Season itself taking place in a remote Alaskan mining town as its long night season begins a team of researchers mysteriously turns up dead bearing suspicious connection to a forgive me Cold Case from years prior who will solve this mystery none other than jod Foster's chief of police Liz Danvers and Kaylee Reese's recently demoted to state trooper Evangeline Navaro two equally troubled officers more than a procedural this season is about the macro political upheaval within this town the consequences of its constant mining coming to a head and pushing the town's residents to finally confront their underlying conflicts be it their parental and marital troubles cultural biases and white supremacy or corruption within the police force I am brave enough to say that this season is not a complete Abomination for what it's worth I think it's very well acted despite flimsy material to go off of particularly in Foster's case there's a deep corrosion to her every delivery not so much an impenetrable emotional Shield over the things she's repressing but a tetany rust that's crusted over everything weathered by her environment and the events of her life small town web of interconnected neighbors is a tried andrue setup for the genre but the remote nature of the fictional Enis is particularly claustrophobic and it gives an air of allegory to all the factional conflicts this season covers heightened by the linal quality of the long night itself and the supernatural elements hinted at throughout the season there are a lot of good ideas that form the identity of of this season so no it's it's not an Abomination it's just incredibly mediocre and fails to deliver on basically any of its promises starting with the case itself Lopez has cited the deat laav pass incident as an inspiration for this season a confounding group Death in the tundra what made people cling to the jetlo pass incident was the sheer Mystique around what happened with so many contradictory details to the case there is a logical explanation for it by virtue of the fact that it happened we'll just never know what it actually is and without confirmation we naturally run wild with it and confound ourselves and even scare ourselves and this idea is actually the closest thing I can draw to a through line across the other seasons of True Detective an unknowable force that our mortal anti-heroes try fruitlessly to make sense of aware of its Cosmic scope so to her credit Lopez was clearly engaging in this conversation by drawing from De love but she kind of writes herself into a corner because when you're making a crime mystery the confounding factors tend to come with the promise of an explanation de love is specifically a staying phenomenon because it doesn't have that which already slots perfectly into True Detectives reputation of intentionally unsatisfying Mysteries so it's telling that Lopez uses it as a springboard for the story and then in the show's final minutes offers a totally cut and dry rational explanation for everything so I guess in this one instance the show is actually delivering too much on its promise when it's following a tradition of not doing so the consequence is that rather than existential horror and mysticism coming from the core of the story Lopez has to resort to drawing it from more extraneous unrelated goings on in the town and spontaneous 2005 esque horror cutaways this means the long night itself is also robbed of any Mystique admittedly it's a strong atmospheric idea a lot of room for obfuscation under the extreme weather conditions and pushing people to their most base animalistic instincts it seems perfectly teed up for the kind of mysterious we'll never know what happened in the dark of night ambiguity the show is always fed on throughout the season we get title cards tracking our progress through this night it seems to suggest some sort of heightened Mass delirium festering as the withdrawal symptoms from the Sun start to set in but it pretty much Pops that balloon in the very first scene we meet our characters in with a remark like just Third Day dark and it already getting weird maybe it's meant to foreshadow that if this is our Baseline imagine how much worse things you're going to get but they don't really the weather conditions mainly amount to sheer inconvenience putting the investigation on pause over and over and the one time it actually endangers a lead character character with danver's rebirth in the finale she gets enough plot armor for the cold to not even matter ironically the one time a character does die from the elements she's found by the Coast Guard within an hour in these supposedly horrendous conditions if anything this dark unseemly atmosphere gives the season an excuse to spend long stretches in the Cozy Christmas decorated indoors safe from the elements and safe from any real interrogation of human cruelty and messiness and unknowability on that note The Season's approach to politics is a little frustratingly simple for one it takes a very post George Floyd brand of aab fervor approach to its rhetoric interrogating police corruption which feels closer to the likes of Brooklyn 99 than True Detective now I'm not saying this is an unwelcome Pursuit by any means and it certainly feels more warranted in a serious police drama than a sitcom but it feels like it's very clearly signaling the events of 2020 more than something Timeless and Universal again nothing wrong with pursuing immediacy and engaging with relevant politics but when you're this lasered in on events that are coming up on four years ago it doesn't feel so immediate I'm not sure I can identify what the difference is it's possible metatextual info influenced my experience here but when the George Floyd protests were happening and everybody was watching stuff like do the right thing it was crazy how its timelessness made it feel so immediate and relevant despite coming out 30 years prior whereas night country feels very much stuck in a time and place despite how recent that time in place was notice how the hero cops agree that cops are bad so we don't have to work to like or empathize with them or hitting plot beats that 13 Reasons Why was hitting four years ago maybe what it boils down to is that this season is only interested in the cleanest most convenient kind of complexity dancing around what's really an already status quo conclusion the persecuted anupat are monolithically good and sagely until their act of Vengeance that makes up the show's pivotal reveal the White characters are unanimously averse to aat tradition and only show solidarity and performance not practice and these political grp groups only exist as groups with no individual people with conflicting personalities and ideologies and lived in lives making them up be it the activists or the miners or the factory workers there are attempts at making the character's lives messy but never do they actually betray these hard political lines and break out of their archetypical cliches I needed Dean Kan to show up and twist everyone's brain into a pretzel this lack of complexity or specificity carries into the interpersonal character drama not that interpersonal drama is mutually exclusive from politics quite the opposite especially in something as explicitly politically charged as this but on every level our characters are absolved of any hard decision making after being betrayed by her girlfriend Leah just cuts her off and that's that no hard Reckoning no confrontation no attempt to Grapple with the things that make it hard to cut someone you thought you loved out of your life granted it was a pretty extreme situation that could maybe justify the extreme response but this show has a knack for writing situations that justify characters not confronting the complicated emotions it's already spent so much time setting up for instance we spend the whole season watching young prior reckon with the fact that his dad is a monster the culmination of 5 hours puts him in this position where he has to choose between his dad and his found mentor and then right as The Crucible is closing up Hank makes the decision for him by starting to shoot Danvers and turning his death into a matter of protection and self-defense this is one of my biggest cop drama pet peeves a sort of pre- absolution that makes it to our characters never have to dip their toes into morally gray terrain night country tries to pretend it's shown us a hard moral decision by making prior hide the body but morally he knows he's done the right thing and he's only hiding the body because of the corrupt police infrastructure which if anything only vindicates him further and sure he feels guilty cuz it's his dad but like what else was he supposed to do the end reveal offers a scenario to comment on vigilante justice and guilt by association gone too far but by showing us unambiguously that every scientist partook in killing Anie K and thus equally deserved punishment I've really tried to get out of the habit of using this word in criticism but a lot of this just strikes me as lazy a prime example would be the character Rose who in a mid-season reveal apparently had a whole past life as a professor and intellectual not once does she mention what she taught or what she wrote about in her supposedly many academic papers from afar it resembles Dimension but when you look closely it reveals that there's no substance there like noticing the fingers on an AI generated image or I don't know the fake rock band on an AI generated poster Lopez actually addressed the AI posters but her explanation has the same err of retroactive justification that comes with every show or movie that gets caught using AI I'm sure you could come up with a similar explanation for Rose's backstory oh she doesn't go into specifics because she so over that life and doesn't care about it anymore but why put your energy into coming up with reasons for things not to be specific when you can instead put it into making them specific and coming up with character details I don't know it probably sounds like I'm nitpicking at this point but I bring all this up to demonstrate that there's no real follow through on any of the complicated themes or emotions Lopez has spoken so much about in press material and that makes it hard to pinpoint what the actual takeaway is meant to be here the only things left to fall back on or the Thematic interests that have always accompanied True Detective and that leads us to the parado do that is trying to conceptualize this season as its own thing are a piece of this broader body of work by like the second or third episode the show had already gained notoriety for its callbacks to season 1 and various structural elements and Easter eggs scattered about seeming to have learned all the wrong lessons from Fargo and this is where it falls into the American Psycho 2 trap it's been documented that Lopez wrote and pitched night country as its own unrelated miniseries and HBO offered to fold it into True Detective as they were having issues with PS so they announced Lopez as to write and direct the new season I think this is pretty evident in the actual material so presumably that writing process was just a series of edits to tie night country into the True Detective Universe it's understandable that people scrutinize this season against its predecessors particularly season 1 not only are recurring elements mentioned didn't start asking the right [ __ ] questions not asking the right questions not asking the right questions but in many ways the form of the narrative bends to match that of the the first season as though the structure of True Detective is some sort of monom myth Lopez drops us into the language of long car conversations Doling out character philosophies there's a scenario where we watch the detectives kill suspects in a flashback while listening to them tell a cover story in the present where they didn't murder anyone we get an attempt at dual timelines kind of and a direct call back to the time as a flat circle monologue except where rust Cole and Marty Hart talk about the cosmos and human nature in their longar talks Danver and Aro talk about Tinder where season one more or less brushes past the unreliable narration of killing suspects to show how casual this sort of thing is in police operations the matter of actess of it speaking louder than direct confrontation night country builds its entire case around this act and Danver admitting it to Prior is something of an emotional climax to the story which ironically makes it less powerful where season 1 has a proper dual timeline night country finds itself in a weird limbo where the only two ways to look at it are as having a totally wimpy dual timeline or is having excessive flashbacks the latter of which I think is probably the more accurate way to look at it and as for time is a flat circle the call back here is probably the most Shameless unearned moment in the whole series like American Psycho 2 a lot of these aspects are severely exacerbated by this sort of onetoone scrutiny I'm not saying it's great or particularly revealing or insightful dialogue but the Tinder car conversation feels like a lot more of a misfire when you think of it as trying to recreate rust and Marty's conversations and a lot less of one when you think of it in a vacuum as just regular TV dialogue again still not great Lopez struggles with verbal finesse and Nuance but not a direct betrayal per se I also found myself frustrated with Danver and navara's foil often being characterized with the same aggressive emotionally inaccessible devices as each other but a lot of this frustration came from applying the exact rust Marty Dynamic and when I tried not doing that I found myself more apathetic than actively fr frustrated and as for the time as a flat circle thing I've got no defense for that one but this isn't quite the same as American Psycho for starters I'm sure there still would have been a viewership for this star studded HBO show without the True Detective name though maybe it was only able to snag this cast and be greenlit by HBO by using the True Detective name so is in either case that's still distinctly different from the development of ap2 Lopez was also clearly striving to make a resonant work of art and not just a commercial product so I can't exactly apply the oh they were trying to make a piece of garbage line of thinking here an American Psycho to has basically one scene tying it to the original plus some voiceover and is otherwise completely divorced as a movie whereas Lopez has been very vocal about the relationship between night country and season 1 not just thinking of these aspects as tiin and Easter eggs or whatever but conceiving of the very fabric of this season as a mirror image to the first season so I would say it improves the season to div divorce any actual true detectiv isms from it but doing so opens up a series of complications removing a core intent from a work in order to enjoy it feels slightly like not how art works and if anything I'm sure Lopez would take offense to the notion that this show is only good when you remove one of her biggest aspirations from it there's death of the artist but it's hard to really kill the artist when the inter textuality she's harping on is so baked into the content of the work plus even if she were never commissioned do True Detective if HBO just taken her night country pitch at face value and ran it there would still be an undeniable True Detective influence there without any excuse to be like oh well if you don't think about it as True Detective that first season still is so influential you could slap a True Detective prefix onto half the [ __ ] that's coming out right now True Detective May of East Town in fact let's compare night country to May of East Town real quick HBO minseries about a middle-aged alcoholic woman detective who's trying to move on from an an unsolved case while dealing with her lesbian daughter's messy relationship and a younger male partner on the force whose relationship with her evokes a sense of cradle robbing oh and a dead son maybe I'm giving marav toown a little too much credit for some of these tropes but the True Detective to marav toown tonight country back to True Detective Dynamic is rare levels of snake eating its own tail maybe time is a flat circle after all but after all that and maybe it's because of the saturation of True Detective cribbing that's still going on I still struggle to conceive of night country as an actual season of True Detective most of the connections are really quite arbitrary the tuttles could be any Corporation the Travis coal lore doesn't add anything to either season the spiral amounts to a completely empty payoff they don't enrich they mostly just exacerbate what's already a mediocre season of TV so yes tldr all this defense and qualification is to say that night country is not completely horrible it's just not very good with Lopez now being commissioned to tackle season 5 instead of handing it over to another voice we may be watching the very identity of this show be overtaken and eclipsed I know I said I wasn't going to talk about anyone's Behavior here and I don't exactly condone pelat fueling the fire but I'm definitely sympathetic to watching your baby get taken away from you and raised into adulthood by someone else and I'm even immune to the season 2 reappraisal that's been going on and think season 1 was mostly lightning in a bottle but it's just very very transparent how much HBO views the True Detective name as a commodity for built-in viewership rather than a specific expression and I'm afraid all it's going to do for Lopez who isn't exactly agency free in all this but whom I don't blame for pouncing on the opportunity is either bring more uncharitable engagement toward her work or just run the show into the ground wish I had a more optimistic note to leave on here but uh hey you can't win them all as always links are in the description like share comment subscribe [ __ ] maybe even hit the notification Bell if you're feeling crazy tonight thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 34,653

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Id: CZ4d7juHdSA

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024