"Season Two of True Detective is better than Season One" - The Wildcard, 2015

Apparently that’s a controversial statement.

The first season of True Detective on HBO has already sprung a dynasty of copycats and a revolution in how telly gets made. Casting A-Lister Matty McConaughey right in the midst of the McConnaisance and slapping him down next to former A-Lister and still-pretty-cool-bloke Woody Harrelson gave life to the new mini-series format (which, to be fair, is something that they’ve been doing in England for ages). Shorter series means higher production values and better casting. Movie actors cane take a month or two out of whatever they’re otherwise doing to get them 8-10 weeks in the glowing spotlight later in the year. They can afford these pet directors to come in and really go wild with all the extra room for expression and creativity in the longer format without being inhibited by ratings and perpetuating plots. Because there’s nothing HBO likes more than flagship programming.

Except that with all the critical acclaim of the first season, I never once felt like it was worth the hype. It was important for what it did for television, but damn was that show overrated. Maybe it’s because I was too dumb to pick up on the depth and subtleties… or maybe it’s because there were none.

Two brilliant performances by two dependable actors (hey, say what you want about rom-com McConaughey, but he was always ‘dependable’). Gorgeous cinematography and maverick direction (shout out to Cary Joji Fukunaga). A wicked soundtrack and an eerie mood throughout. Fascinating settings. Those were what made the first series great.

What held it down were most other things. None of the other characters were interesting. Certainly not the women, as has so vocally been pointed out in certain corners of the internet, but none of the other men were interesting either. There were two worthy characters in this show. Four if you get to count the past and present versions both. The modern day police interrogations were sloppy and they were only there as an excuse to get McConaughey proselytising his particular brand of nihilism. Which was awesome, granted.

But too often it fell short of the heights it strived for. It wanted to be Jean-Paul Sartre meets Hannibal Lecter meets David Lynch but none was especially close. The Yellow King stuff had people drawn in to this profound mystery but it all ended up fizzing out. Smoke and mirrors. A very solid finale made up for a lot of this, nonetheless the show was still maybe only a 7/10. It was sweaty and swampy and tipsy and woozy and flashy and medicated. Yet only at its best when nothing was happening. And you have to credit the two leads for that because while the dialogue written for them was occasionally profound, most often it was clunky and almost always incongruous. To quote another great philosopher: “They muddy the water to make it seem deep”. In this case, they write deliberately confusing stuff so that you don’t realise how shallow it really is.

Nic Pizzolatto is the mastermind behind the show’s writing and creation. Read any interview or biography of him and you’ll notice how they blatantly refer to him not as a screenwriter first but as a Novelist. Perhaps even an award-winning one. The point is that he’s sold not as your regular TV genius but as something more prestigious. This man wrote a novel.

He’s a good writer but not a great one. Still a crime-fiction peddler at heart, a genre which makes for lightweight books and heavyweight television. Pizzolatto is no Elmore Leonard but he has many talents.

With season two, he still writes some clunky dialogue. Vince Vaughn’s ramblings at the start of the second episode were… odd. It was a well-delivered speech with some nice moments of writing but it was also meant to be strongly metaphorical for his current situation while comparing it to getting locked in a basement as a child, getting chewed on by a rat that he then bashed to an actual pulp and inspired by a pair of water damaged marks on the roof above his bed. Which then faded into the burnt out eyes of a dead guy in the next scene. It’s a lot to ponder as an audience member.

What’s relieving is that it didn’t turn into a metaphysical spew about religion or ethics and that’s where this season is thriving through two episodes. Gone is the overblown, pretentious, faux-spiritual crap. In its place we have an actual story with some immediacy.

Vaughn’s character, Frank Semyon, is a mobster who’s put all his assets in with Ben Caspere, a city manager. There’s a massive boon coming in the real estate business, something about a Hollywood production, and they’re getting in early. Definite elements of Chinatown (1975). Except Caspere goes missing before he makes the purchases, disappearing with all of Frank’s money. Then Caspere turns up dead and an investigation ensues.

Three detectives are put on the case, all for different reasons that are explained in turn during an entertaining stretch early in the second episode. The state wants to take control because of recent newspaper allegations of corruption in the fictional town of Vinci where it’s all set. However the body falls into an ongoing Vinci Police search that started with Caspere going AWOL. Taylor Kitsch’s Paul Woodrugh is the state’s trump card. He’s a highway patrolman with some serious PTSD (and he might be gay) who happened to find the body, so he’s on the case as a favour to the state and as a way to salvage his career after a drunken actress (falsely) accused him of solicitation when he pulled her over. He might even get a promotion out of it, but he just wants to go back to “being on the bike”.

Then Rachel McAdam’s Ani Bezzerides is placed as primary commander of the detail. She’s there to guard against suspicions of “obfuscation” on the part of the Vinci cops. That’s because it’s strongly believed that the secondary officer, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) is corrupt. Which he is, with his links to Frank. Bezzerides comes from a commune family that she’s strongly rebelling against (note the order and formalism of the police force) and she may also have a gambling problem and some weird sex thing. Velcoro is a drowning alcoholic with an ex-wife and son who probably isn’t his. At this stage it’s been suggested that the kid (a fat ginger) was the product of rape, a rape which Velcoro seemingly took revenge for against the perpetrator with the help of Frank – instigating their relationship.

Velcoro’s appointment has a lot to do with his being in the pocket. Frank is giving kickbacks to the mayor too. You see, Vinci politicians are getting massive financial windfalls from the town’s polluting industrialist corner which they believe the state wants to get their hands on. Seeing as a city manager’s is the body at the middle of this, the investigation could uncover skeletons in some compromising closets, so Ray is there to “control the flow of information”. Which is more or less the definition of ‘obfuscation’. He asks if he’s meant to actually solve the case or not, he’s told to just make sure there are “no surprises”.

They even get a headquarters in an abandoned garage. Add in all the conflicts of interest, lack of needless exposition and the untranslated cop chatter and True Detective is going hard at the lineage of The Wire. It wants the crown that HBO’s original modern flagship vacated. However they’ve kept the monologues, the hints of absurdity, the borderline exploitation (all hard-boiled detective stories are exploitative in some way. True Detective likes to get in and amongst the scum that it portrays which is where a lot of the edgy fun stems from).

What we have now is a show that’s starting to figure out what it is. And that’s super entertaining if you understand what you’re in for. If you go in preparing for another season of psychic mystery then perhaps you fell too hard for the audience pandering of last season.

Oh, and don’t be mistaken, True Detective is a show that knows how to pander. It may present itself as ultra-high-concept and supremely intelligent, but that’s there to pat viewers on the back for giving it a chance. Film actors, suspense, sex, high production, watercooler plot points… those are all examples of pandering. At its heart it’s pulp fiction. The genre, not the film. Pulp fiction is always better when it accepts what it is. We keep the air of surrealism but without the trappings of going all out and then having to make it stick to grittily realistic world. There’s no big bad wolf here, not yet anyway, and so we lose the philosophising on good and evil, light and dark, salvation and forsakenness, and we have a world full of whatever falls in between.

“My strong suspicion is that we get the world we deserve” – Ray Velcoro

Okay, the show still leans on moral preaching, it just no longer pretends it has the answers. The chances of this changing through the next six episodes is high but for now what we’re getting is better than what we got before. It’s a better show. Reviews don’t tend to say so, but it is. We still have compelling leads and stunning visuals, despite the main men of McConaughey, Harrelson and Fukunaga moving on. Well, Kitsch’s character is a flop so far (literally on one sense) and Vaughn isn’t always entirely comfortable. But Farrell and McAdams are superb, and let’s give Vince Vaughn a little credit because he has some great scenes. He’s a bit love-him-or-hate-him as a comedic actor, and most self-respecting comedy fans won’t have seen him in a role for a decade at least. But he’s got screen presence. Plus any problems with his character are more to do with the fact that Frank’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. There’s not much to do yet, however there’s a growing sense of claustrophobia and the further sense that he’s nearing breaking point. The interrogation scene on the side of the road in ep. 2 was his best work so far.

Pizzolatto’s still there. His script is so much vaster this time around. It’s not just a buddy cop duo driving around and chatting as the world around them fades into a swampy haze. Here we have a city with some mythology. Supporting characters with some history. An actual setting and not somebody’s fading memory of a town, with a monster at the end of it. We’re more grounded. Decisions have consequences and we’re actually allowed to care about them. It’s stripped back to the point where it can flourish on its own merits.

Maybe I’m the only one that thinks this, but two episodes in I’m already more invested than I ever was in season one.