Review: True Detective Premiere

True Detective is that person you know who loves to drop names. Look it’s McConaughey! Hey, there’s Harrelson! Robert W. Chambers! Lovecraft! Cthulu!!!

It worked in the first season of the show, in part because the Lovecraftian mythos that it was tapping into has grown into an expanded universe taken up by a variety of authors and used to tell new stories, and in part because people in general were less familiar with the names being dropped. The average person would need to spend at least a little time on Google to figure out what the in the world was up with The King in Yellow. That little bit of searching, investigating if you will, transformed the first season of True Detective into a singular experience. When all of that is combined with the spooky artistry that Fukunaga loves so much, the show became an atmospheric dynamo.

Season two, which premiered last night, however, doesn’t have the same things working in its favor. In addition to the names of the cast (Vaughn, Kitsch, McAdams, and Farrell are all highlighted and given character details in the opening episode), the show tries to do the same brand of allusive name dropping that worked so well in season one. Chinatown! The Maltese Falcon! James Ellroy! The difference is that these names and features are so well known that the show takes on a faint whiff of what I call Peggy Hill syndrome. Do you remember Peggy Hill, the wife of Hank Hill on Fox’s animated masterpiece King of the Hill? Her character’s most defining trait was a totally misplaced confidence in her own creativity, she would offer up hackneyed clichés and tidbits of common knowledge as if they were germs of original wisdom, “I’ve always said, a penny saved is a penny earned,” and that kind of thing. You get the same vibe in this first episode of the second season, the show is offered up as the brain child of a Nick Pizzolatto’s singular creative voice, but it’s hard not to pay too much attention to the stitching. Gone is the striking visual palate that made season one so successful, Justin Lin—he of the Fast and Furious franchise—brings nothing of his own distinctive kinetic style to the first episode. Instead he seems to be trying to do a Fukunaga impression, and instead ends up with something that comes off as the RC Cola to Roman Polanski’s Coke.

Not even the acting can come to the rescue here. Vaughn’s character calls for a deep sense of stillness and menace, and Vaughn has all the stillness of a fish flopping in the bottom of a boat. Farrell is trying his best, but the moment the script (in true HBO fashion) attempts to elicit our empathy with his downfall with a story about how his wife was brutally raped and he got into bed with organized crime in order to find the man responsible, I immediately checked out. At this point the use of sexual violence against women as a way for us to enter the interior life of a white guy on HBO has practically become “Where’s Waldo?” it seems to be hiding somewhere in every script. Rachel McAdams is given nothing to play but daddy issues (her father, the head of a local hippy “institute” is played by David Morse, and he is the best part of the opening hour). And we actually watch Taylor Kitsch take some erectile dysfunction medication and wait in the bathroom, impatiently checking his watch until it kicks in. That we are so loaded up with back story in the opening episode betrays, to my mind, a little insecurity on the part of Pizzolatto. A lot of people worked to make the first season of True Detective what it was, and now he is all that is left. That’s got to be a scary place to be. I liked the original season, and I hope that season two can turn it around. But based on what I have seen so far, I can’t blame anyone who might be concerned.