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Notes -
True Detective Night Country
There is a culture war internet discourse happening around HBO’s newest show True Detective Night Country. The discourse can generally be summed up as follows: HBO newest show TD Night Country is the 4th season of an anthology mystery/crime miniseries. The first season came out ten years ago and it starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives searching for a killer in Louisiana. The plot does not particularly matter, but the show is widely viewed as one of the greatest single seasons of TV ever. Speaking for myself, I agree with this assessment. I return to it every few years and I am still impressed at how good the acting, story, and cinematography are.
Fast forward ten years…two mediocre seasons (2 and 3) were released, and HBO announced the release of True Detective Season 4, co-named Night Country. Season 4 stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as two detectives unravelling a murder mystery in Alaska and people were very, very excited for this season. Prior to release, Night Country received overwhelming critical reception from TV critics. It currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score (RT can be gamed, but the 93% score shows the general reception).
I was also very excited for this show. Critics were calling it the best season of True Detective since season 1; some were even saying it was better than season 1. With these very lofty expectations, I watched the show as it was released, week by week.
By episode two, I knew this show had problems. By episode four, I knew it just wasn’t very good. By episodes 5 and 6, I was hate watching. Many people have reviewed and discussed the show’s problems much more eloquently than I. This video is quite good and sums up the many many problems the show has:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y2TCOd_YZF4
What I will say is that the show is simply…boring. It is a six-hour miniseries and at least 70% of the show is filled with boring relationship drama (the remaining 30% being focused on the actual…criminal investigation). The characters are uninteresting, low stakes, and unlikeable. The easter eggs paying homage to season 1 are like a frying pan to the face in their obviousness. The story carries no emotional weight, has major plot holes, and the ending is unsatisfying and bewildering. It’s bad. I would not recommend this show to anyone.
Now here is where the culture war comes into play. Online, fans of the True Detective series are panning the series. Go check out the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is a paltry 61%. The True Detective subreddit is especially critical of the show. People are especially disappointed and confused given how critically hyped it was before its release.
But what has happened is that many critics, podcasters, even Issa Lopez, the director, are blaming the backlash on sexism and misogyny. They say that male fanboys of season 1 are brigading review sites and review bombing the show. They are saying that the viewers dislike the show because it features two women lead detectives and that viewers can’t stand the lack of masculinity that was so integral to season 1. Even the professional critics who have dared to post their negative opinions on Twitter are being called misogynistic.
The problem with this read is that…the show sucks. It’s just not good for all of the reasons I’ve listed above. It’s extremely frustrating to see people called misogynistic and “anti-woke” for criticizing a show with two women leads. I find it particularly unfair because other detective shows with women leads, such as Mare of Eastown or Sharp Objects, were fantastic. It didn’t receive the critical backlash because those shows were actually good. We now exist in a bizarre universe where a magazine like Rolling Stone overwhelmingly praises the show while a magazine like Forbes pans it.
I’m not one who normally gets involved in the culture war, but I found this discourse particularly egregious. I don’t know what the future of this series holds, but I’m hoping someone at HBO sees the light.
Update: Issa Lopez has been hired to write and direct season 5 of True Detective. Whoosh.
I feel like this is generally an issue with miniseries. There's this relentless need to take the half of the show that's about an interesting topic (Mindhunter particularly galling for this) and then wedge it against the protagonist's personal relationship issues, especially if it's a period piece with period vibes for the main concept and yet the protagonist is living their personal problems through 2020 norms and cultural memes. I understand the actual core stuff is what costs money and is hard to write, but the amount of shows where it has to be wild pingponging between 'here is the thing the show is about' and 'here is his girlfriend feeling neglected' is ridiculous.
The Mr and Mrs Smith show on Amazon was guilty of this and I stopped watching at three episodes in. They squandered an interesting setup on what felt like the writers rehashing all the most awkward parts of their own failed relationships.
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I think it's a problem with period pieces in general. Robert Eggers's work (The Vvitch, The Northman) is one of the few examples I can think of where someone in mass media attempted to have the characters' concerns match what people of that period's actual concerns would have been. And while I'm not sure what Eggers's feelings about religion are, I can tell from his films that he actually gets religious people, something that makes him better than 99% of people in tv and film. The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
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