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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've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
I think there is a simple explanation for this dynamic. Imagine you're big media conglomerate such as Disney, and you own an innumerable number of IPs. If you try to do a "full revival" of a reasonably old show with not only all/most of the cast but also all/most of the original creative team, you'll run into the problem that media has not only a particularly extreme rate of turnover and both mobility and stickiness at different points in the career. Some people will not even be in Showbiz anymore and you will have to hunt them down, some will have become so sucessful that they're exceptionally well-paid, some will have carved out a comfortable main role in a mediocre but long-running TV show that they flat-out refuse to join the revival no matter what. It's tedious, it's expensive, and you might still just end up with a few anyway since the others refuse. So you ONLY attempt this if you're really, really confident about its success.
Now imagine you want to do a fully new IP. It has no old fans that you can appeal to, it has no basic structure that you know to work. So it's inherently risky.
On the other hand, a "lazy revival" is easy & cheap . It's basically all the upsides of a new IP, but much safer; You're almost guaranteed to have a lucrative first season, and if the viewer numbers are visibly crashing on the later episodes than you just discontinue it right there. And it costs you nothing extra as you're already owning the old IP anyway. You just send a call out to a small number of original cast members that seem likely to join and add to the recognisability. You hire a bunch of cheap, new creative members who get a chance to show their chops or get the cut. And the woke/SJW worldview lends itself very well to replacing most of the cast, so you use that as the cover ("we're just updating this old, beloved western classic to be more in-line with modern global viewer preferences"). Not that people don't believe that worldview, but the other way around, people tend to believe worldviews that are convenient for them.
Obviously, there is always some cases where it seems to be just dumb; Buying an expensive IP and then ruining it with a bad new cast & creative team. But I think it has become an almost industry-standard because of the former. And in some cases, such as Star Wars, they arguably did put in a lot of work; They got decent parts of the original cast, J.J. Abrams, whatever your opinion of him, is a sucessful movie director and they clearly tried to replicate the structure of the old movies (and too much so, in my opinion).
I think the problems with the Star Wars sequel trilogy can mainly be blamed on Iger rushing it to theaters.
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