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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.
You know what was really awful, with terrible plot, weak characters and acting, and tons of boring filler?
Every Jean Claude Van Damme movie.
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
I'm not going to make any claims about this True Detective thing, I didn't watch the show, haven't followed the coverage or reaction, haven't seen the director's interviews. Don't really care about the particulars of this one case much, the dynamic you are describing is definitely a thing that could exist and very well may, for all I know.
But I do want to complicate the narrative beyond 'The people giving this show terrible reviews aren't saying it's bad because it has female leads and don't explicitly believe that's why they dislike it, therefore the director is wrong to say that they are rejecting it because it has female leads.'
No one would say 'I like Jean Claude Van Damme movies because the lead character is a man.' But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them. It can be true both that male audiences did not reject those movies out of explicit misogyny, and that they would have enjoyed them more if they had starred a cheesy male lead. Those two things don't actually contradict each other.
So there is in fact a nuanced claim the director could be making here, that audiences 'aren't ready' for a female lead in this type of story, or that the story was written in a way that would appeal more to women audiences but the existing audience was mostly male and liked it less, or that having female leads and director led to some necessary changes from the first season that aren't bad but that are noticeably different and therefore upsetting to big fans who were promised a return to form, or etc. etc. etc.
I just want to carve out the fact that there is room for nuanced claims in this discussion, and we don't always have to reduce discussions about things like this down to the barest-bone caricatures of the two 'sides' in the culture war.
The very obvious explanation is that neither men nor most women actually enjoy watching a woman act like a man. An action movie featuring a thin woman punching, shooting, or otherwise overpowering men is not only wildly unrealistic, but also just aesthetically revolting on a primal level. Women are not actually strong, hypercompetent, ruthless badasses. The number of women who have ever lived who could truthfully be described in this way could probably all fit inside an average-sized parking lot. The number of women who have been successful police detectives is probably a bit larger - maybe it’d take two parking lots to fit all of them - but the fact remains that this is also a heavily male profession, generally utilizing classically masculine virtues.
Now, it’s unclear if you’re identifying this phenomenon as “explicit misogyny”. The director could be fully correct that audiences reacted poorly to this show on account of its female leads, but also totally wrong that this is “sexist” or “misogynistic”. Men and women are different. The overwhelming majority of both men and women are aware of this. They strongly prefer media which accurately depicts men as men and women as women, and in which men and women embody the virtues typical of their respective sexes. I wouldn’t want to watch a film about a male nurse or caregiver; the only three films I can think of off the top of my head which feature males employed in those professions are Meet The Parents (including its sequels), Mr. Mom, and The Pacifier - all of which are comedies which treat this situation as inherently and hilarious incongruous and weird.
Whether we’re talking about action movies or romcoms - the two most broadly popular film genres of our age - the overwhelming default is men acting like men and women acting like women. To the extent that True Detective challenges this dynamic by treating two women as hypercompetent, dogged, logically-minded badasses, it’s doomed to fail. I haven’t seen any episodes of any season of the show, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s the case, but if it is then perhaps instead of blaming misogyny the director and the writers should blame themselves for making media that people didn’t ask for and didn’t want to watch.
There are a bunch of action movies with female leads that are widely considered good or at the very least have mass appeal. See: Aliens, Fury Road, Kill Bill, Terminator, Hunger Games, Underworld (not actually very good but a box office hit), etc. That expands further when you include movies that don't have female leads actually beating guys up but still taking aggressive, active roles. See: Zero Dark Thirty, Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoos, Sicario, half of all horror movies ever made, etc.
Humans have had warrior goddesses for thousands of years. Surely the ancient Canaanites did not find Anat aesthetically revolting.
I guess the Underworld series falls into the "fighting f*cktoy" genre, so it doesn't really count. At least not in the eyes of mainstream feminists.
And for any characters where it's too hard to apply that label, behold the Female Character Flowchart for some other options. (It's from a post on a 2010 nerd-feminist blog that was linked on Jezebel and made the rounds, it stuck with me because normally you only see such critiques used one at a time.)
And they have to resort to scare quotes ("Strong" female character) to disparage one expected action character path.
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