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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 have to rant about a particular incredibly stupid plot point in the finale. SPOILERS if anyone cares.
It's revealed that the scientists at the lab are studying a life form in the permafrost and that they are better able to access the life form due to pollution created by the local mine which melts the permafrost. So not only does the lab publish fake reports about the pollution levels to protect the mine, but the lab actually asks the mine to pollute more to help its research along. This pollution causes deaths, birth defects, and other problems in the local town. The lab claims that their research will revolutionize the field of health in some unspecified ways, and that their work will eventually be unfathomably valuable.
Ok, so...
God, I know Hollywood hates corporations, but why does it think they are so stupid?
Screenwriters and especially studio execs are dimwits who know bugger-all about science, but have absorbed the notion (from watching Captain Planet and Ferngully as kids) that science is Bad and destroys the environment.
Questions like "why don't they ship the permafrost off to some place where it's safer to melt" and "why can't they buy the stuff they need instead of getting it from pollution" are more "they have no common sense" than "they know nothing about science".
That's part of "are dimwits".
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And so have most of their audience.
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I wouldn’t say stupid. It’s that most of them have majored in film and writing and have been working on only that kind of thing and most likely have never met working scientists, business owners, or anyone who isn’t involved in writing and filmmaking.
That kind of insular world creates all kinds of stupid blind spots. They don’t understand science or know anyone who does, so they understand science only on a popular science IFLS level where it’s either terrible and destructive, or it basically shits out gadgets and stands in for magic.
Of course they do the same with politics, history, journalism, and education too.
I think one of the biggest things holding back screenwriting is that insular perspective. Not only does it prevent people from making compelling stories about other subjects, but since everyone has the exact same thoughts about those topics, there’s not really anything surprising. Andy Weir is good at making stories about ordinary working people in space because he studied the physics and chemistry of space and because he likely knows a good number of blue collar workers who don’t think like the elites do.
This same industry will hire sensitivity readers to ensure that they're not making the slightest offense to the most terminally online members of favored groups.
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From the purely academic g or IQ or whatever perspective, these people probably don't fall into the category of what people think of when they think of "stupid people." The mere ability to put together a script with a coherent plot and structure that fits a TV show (e.g. each episode presents some self-contained plot point that serves as a piece of the larger season-long plot) probably excludes them from that.
But as the mother of a fictional stupid person always said, stupid is as stupid does. And the behavior you describe is extremely stupid. If you're writing a mostly grounded script that involves some scientific mechanism as a core plot point and will be presented to a broad adult audience, then obviously getting that mechanism to be plausible to a layman adult should be a high priority. Which means checking the science and the typical layman's understanding of the science, so as to make sure that they're not falling prey to blind spots created by their insular perspective. After all, it's common knowledge that everyone has blind spots and that no one has a true grasp of their own blind spots; as such, if getting this plot point to sound believable to a typical viewer matters to the writers, then they would check.
They either didn't check or didn't care to implement what they learned when they checked. This indicates that they either actively chose to write the script in a way that made themselves appear stupid or just didn't care about it.
I think some people don’t know what they don’t know, and when everyone around them has similar blind spots it gets really hard to realize that you’re in one. For example, I’ve never been to Europe. Nobody I know has ever been to Europe, and none of my friends know anyone who has ever been to Europe. So were I to write something about life in Europe, the deficit would be obvious to people who have been to Europe, but not to me, and not to my first level draft readers (who are likely to be people I know personally). Nobody else sees the problem because they have similar low level assumptions about Europe that I do. Then nobody can point out that high tea isn’t really a thing, for example, or that London doesn’t look like brownstone buildings anymore or what have you.
Yes ideally you check. I try to check as well. But if you don’t know that you don’t know, things get missed simply because is sounds right to you.
But as you demonstrated, you were able to predict all of these problems that would arise from your own blind spots. As such, if you did decide to write a story that took place in Europe, you are now equipped to at least avoid and possibly mitigate these problems. The biggest insight I'd say you presented is that because everyone has unknown unknowns, it follows that it sounds right to you should, by no means, be the bar by which you decide if it actually is right for your story. Knowing all this, if you still decide to just proceed based on it sounds right to you instead of researching with actual Europeans or Europe experts and, as a result, you fail in your goal of writing a story that presents a believable description of a story taking place in real-world Europe, then I would describe that as, at the very least, acting stupid.
Of course, a writer probably doesn't have the time and energy to do this kind of checking for every possible unknown unknown or even every plausible one. But if the details are as important as to be pivotal to the main plot point of the story, it seems stupid not to prioritize getting that right.
I mean I’m able to predict that I don’t know those things because in that case, it’s a known issue for me. I’m also not exactly up to speed on a lot of other topics, including things that I think I know. And if everyone around me has the same blind spots and misbeliefs about a given topic, the chances of something getting on the screen that’s obviously wrong to an expert, or even a layperson interested in the subject goes up quite a bit.
I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t know much about the law. Most people don’t. The problem is that because of the popularity of legal shows and crime dramas, most people think they know the law. Any draft readers will have the same ideas about the law you do. And so it gets into police and crime dramas where most people think that’s how the law works. Any knowledgeable lawyer or even anyone who’s been in a real courtroom knows that the courtroom scenes of most crime dramas are bunk. Jury trials don’t work that way, at all. The lawyers are not allowed to pontificate as they do in crime dramas. The rules of what kinds of evidence and testimony and questions you can ask are far stricter than what TV has taught American audiences about criminal law. It still shows up on TV every week.
Right, and that phenomenon of getting things wrong due to being around people who are similarly ignorant as oneself is also common knowledge. I'd wager, for instance, that most Hollywood writers would characterize Evangelical Christians in red enclaves as suffering from this (some of them might think "Oh, those poor ignoramuses might fall prey to echo chambers, but a smart cookie like me is safe," which would be a stupider act than everything else I've written about combined). If there are some details that are important to get correct in one's script for the sake of keeping the audience invested, then it seems rather stupid to me not to avoid this kind of echo chamber effect by intentionally seeking out advice from people outside one's social circles, ideally from actual subject-matter experts.
I'd argue that part of the phenomenon here is that American media and American audiences have created a sort of fictional system of law shared within these various media properties that relies on just-barely-plausible suspension of disbelief that both the creators and the viewers have decided to agree upon in order to make things more entertaining. I categorize the legal systems we see in these shows in the same bin as the trope of a knock in the head being a reliable way to reliably make them lose consciousness for a few hours without any other health implications or sounds of explosions in space.
Funnily enough, one of the many pieces of criticism against the recent Disney+ show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law seemed to be how unrealistic its legal proceedings were. Perhaps they were no less realistic than what we normally see in legal shows, but maybe the show probably didn't respect the agreement of suspension of disbelief and just threw up there whatever was convenient for the plot, which was what lost viewers. If that's what happened, I think that would be stupidity; you don't need to check that the legal system in your script is accurate, but you do need to check that it is believable to your audience, which means checking what constitutes believability to your audience.
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The calibre of people here is higher than your average writer. Plus we actually care about plots and rationality of characters. Writers might not care, they figure out the plot to fit whatever they want to say.
"Somehow Palpatine returned. Despite him apparently resurrecting from the dead, we shall spend absolutely zero effort thinking about how we might kill him permanently."
I find it darkly amusing that this is also largely how the writers of new SW stories think about their political opposition. "Somehow, racism has returned. Despite racism managing to defeat our almost total control of western culture, we shall spend absolutely zero effort thinking about how to actually resolve the problem, and instead double down on the same policies that failed last time."
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