The cult of True Detective was crystallized in a tracking shot in season one’s fourth episode, “Who Goes There.” In those six minutes, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles through a public-housing development, dodging bullets and scaling fences, attempting to escape a race war that he and his partner, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), instigated to gather intel for their investigation into a mythical-seeming murderer. In that sequence, Nic Pizzolatto’s series about the burdens of being a boy in blue felt grand, special, and unpredictable — a sharp single-shooter impression in an otherwise perpetual swirl of fallen angels and extra-wide shots of verdant Louisiana swamps draped in Spanish moss. True Detective cast a spell with the directorial flourish, and it’s been struggling to recapture that alchemy in the ten years since.
True Detective premiered in the middle of Barack Obama’s second term, amid flickering voter optimism in governmental institutions and a growing distrust toward the police. The show was copaganda, yet it disguised itself well, framing its police as bad men but insisting that they kept other bad men from the door — an approach that played as frank and fresh, especially when paired with the fantastical cosmic horror of the show’s other narrative elements. This was a cop show indebted as much to mysterious Eldritchian monsters who manipulate religious doctrine for their own cruelties as it was to the earthbound exhaustion of noir sleuths who argue openly about God and the value of humanity. Thanks to director Cary Joji Fukunaga, True Detective possessed an unprecedented visual cohesion throughout both its existential monologues and involved set pieces, ones that never looked as conservatively conceived (or as conservatively funded) as those of cop dramas before it. This was also auteur TV, a defensive swing for a medium that hadn’t yet been cemented as prestige — months before Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, over two years before Sam Esmail handled all of Mr. Robot season two, and three years before Jean-Marc Vallée oversaw the first season of Big Little Lies. And all of the series’ appeal was narrowed down into those six uninterrupted minutes of bloodshed and vigilantism.
Before Fukunaga’s technical feat in episode four, True Detective was already a hit with audiences who swarmed Twitter and Reddit after each episode to analyze lines of dialogue and production-design screen grabs, trying to unravel theories of who did what in various timelines. But after the tracking shot, the show took on frenzied levels of hype, an expanding supernova of buzz that eventually deflated ever so slightly when the killer turned out to be a born-amid-incest, still-practicing-incest backwoods weirdo who got off on Old Hollywood classics and torturing his father’s corpse — not some mythical creature lurking in a horrifying kingdom called Carcosa. Yet for eight consecutive weeks of Sunday nights in 2014, HBO felt like it was, in Rust’s words, mainlining the truth of the TV universe and offering a vision for how grittily conceived and captivatingly odd the hourlong cop drama could become.
Then 2015’s hastily constructed, broadly messy second season of True Detective landed, followed by 2019’s serviceable-but-forgettable third season, neither of which lived up to audience expectations. The cop characters felt like copies, and then copies of copies, harboring the same types of professional traumas and the same types of personal losses as Rust and Marty. The show remixed old themes — abducted women and children, conspiracies yawning into all the bastions of local power — instead of imagining new ways to communicate a detective’s responsibility and what society asks them to witness and avenge. Its format as an anthology series theoretically granted True Detective a freedom, but in each new plot, the series grappled with an unwillingness to move too far away from that first season. It eventually felt stuck in a rut: constrained by the agonized-officers formula, but also unwilling to return to the uncanny story elements and single-minded directorial hand that made it unique. The franchise was caught in its own flat circle, obsessed with routines and patterns, forgetting that what made the series so captivating to begin with was how willing it was to disassemble the rules of its genre (solidified in many ways by HBO predecessor The Wire) rather than regurgitate them. The diminishing returns were noticeable. More people started watching True Detective’s 2015 second season than its first (3.17 million compared with 2.33), but viewership dropped from there until the finale ended lower than season one (2.73 million compared with 3.52 million). Four years later, the numbers for 2019’s third season were fractional, with 1.45 million as a season high.
Now, after a five-year break and on the same second-Sunday-of-January date as when the original premiered, a fourth season will arrive to a swell of renewed anticipation. On Reddit and Twitter, old fans of the show have pointed out the serendipity of Jodie Foster returning to a role that evokes her Best Actress Oscar-winning work as an FBI trainee, and wondered how filmmaker Issa López’s background in horror will shift the series. Set in the eternal polar night of a small Alaskan town, True Detective: Night Country initially seems like López hedging her bets. She is the sole director and has writing credits on all of this season’s six episodes, and she front-loads them with thematic and production-design nods to the Cohle-and-Hart case that serve as little offerings to series followers, acknowledgments of the puzzles and eccentricities with which they were once so enthralled. A spiraling symbol not unlike the one drawn on Dora Lange’s dead body and branded on Reggie Ledoux’s back is formed out of crime-scene photographs and scrawled on a dead man’s forehead. Shadowy organizations with connections to the police fund the institutions in Ennis, Alaska, that keep most people employed, evoking how the Tuttle family of season one had its hands in education, politics, and the criminal-justice system. Folklore and totems influenced by the town’s original Indigenous inhabitants, like so many devil’s nests, unnerve the (mostly white) outsiders who have moved here for their own professional or personal reasons.
On top of its technical and narrative credits, True Detective has always been an actors’ showcase, a place for performers like Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch to reinvent themselves with verbose line deliveries. In Night Country, Foster melds together her Silence of the Lambs and Inside Man performances into the skeptical, bitchy, secretly soft-hearted police chief Liz Danvers. Boxer turned actress Kali Reis is her raw-edged, short-tempered, unapologetically religious former partner, Evangeline Navarro, and like Marty and Rust before them, they have a ragged chemistry built on contrasting belief systems, uniquely fucked-up family histories, and shared frustrations with being a woman on the job. López’s skill as a writer is teasing out the incongruous qualities within Danvers and Navarro, of contextualizing the chips on their shoulders. But López’s skills as a genre storyteller whose 2017 breakthrough film, Tigers Are Not Afraid, fused a ghost story with the Latin American tradition of magical realism, bring another layer to that bond — one the series has been missing: an inexplicability.
How humanity pollutes the natural world has been a core True Detective inquiry, and Night Country confronts it by suggesting the land, especially in the corners of the world where humans were never supposed to survive, remembers things we forget. If the series’ first season was about how conspiracies force those on the outside of the secret circle into a perpetual position of unknowing, and its second season filtered that idea through a land-grab deal and its third season through a kidnapping, this season implies that we’re all in that ignorance, all the time, no matter the badges we carry, the money we have, or the authority we yield, by virtue of our own subjectivity and our brief time on this earth. In Night Country, no one really knows why other people make the decisions they do, whether those choices are as mundane as turning down someone’s romantic overtures, as dangerous as demanding equal rights from the upper classes in a place with a colonial past, or as extraordinary as shedding one’s clothes and running out into the frozen tundra.
Night Country prioritizes things about True Detective that the series, in its second and third seasons, let fall by the wayside: not only that genre conventions can be played with, but that there’s impact in not answering every question. Danvers and Navarro break rules as Rust and Marty did, but their relationships with other cops and the community they patrol isn’t defined only by aggressive posturing or sneering disdain. To be fair, these women can be assholes to others and to each other, and the series’ tone is fueled by the friction of their interactions and an implicit argument that it’s more important feminism be built on a foundation of solidarity against patriarchy. Yet Danvers and Navarro’s exclusion from Ennis’s community isn’t purely self-imposed; the “true detective” figure being a vigilante for the voiceless is complicated by the fact that Ennis and its inhabitants have their own things to say and might not want to share them with Danvers and Navarro. Deaths send them down increasingly arcane paths — again, as Rust and Marty did. Maybe what they’re seeing could be explained by science, by psychology, by how geological extremes push us to our physical and emotional breaking points. Or maybe human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution, and the spirit of Ennis is trying to even things out.
Adam Arkapaw’s first-season close-ups of Rust staring into a dime-size mirror and Marty grimacing at an exploded baby in a microwave were, in their alienating melancholy, leagues away from how crime TV was spinning its gears on melodramatic terrorism and cut-and-dry domestic-abuse story lines. Here, Night Country cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister accentuates the series’ renewed interest in iconography by playing more deliberately with the light and the dark that Rust talked about in the final moments of the finale, “Form and Void”: the glittering snow and ice of this desolate locale versus the night’s enveloping opacity; the neon of blinking Christmas lights against the rhythmic ripples spreading from a body floating in inky water; the matted fur of a polar bear wandering through the streets of an abandoned downtown; the smear of black paint across the mouth of Indigenous activists marching for land rights. López builds a world of the seen and unseen within these gnarly images, and with them reopens the door True Detective’s first season cracked, behind which Southern Gothic, neo-noir, and the police procedural can all thrive alongside one another in ways unexpected visually and narratively. True Detective might never again pull off anything as flashy as Fukunaga’s tracking shot, but it’s smart for Night Country not to try. What López achieves is a reconfiguring of this franchise’s titular protagonist into a figure not turning its back on the void and declaring victory, but peering over the edge at an eternal miasma, with the sobering knowledge that the subterranean world is reaching ever upward to pull us back into its depths.
