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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.
My issue isn't that the lead women had trash personalities. I'm actually really happy when #currentyear writes women and minorities as bad people. The issue is largely that the lead characters seemed to be badly written male characters that were gender swapped.
Also the 'murderer(s)' breaks suspension of disbelief. It's just a badly written detective show that some bright executive thought it would be a good idea to bolt the franchise's name onto.
Edit:
This was a forgone conclusion. The finale thread on /r/TrueDetective has a few comments (cough) predicting this deflection.
I would be happy, but I typically find that the writer themselves or the fictional world around the characters don't notice that they're bad people and just Yass Queen at everything.
This seems a really common criticism of these types of characters. I've heard people say about characters like She-Hulk, Galadriel from Rings of Power, Velma, and Echo that they start the show as aggressive, unlikable people, as if they're setting up for some sort of redemption or growth character arc, but instead it's the rest of the world that bends around her to make everything work out. And fans don't seem to connect with it. What I don't get is that this could've been predicted by anyone who took an intro to writing fiction class. When there are millions of dollars on the line with these productions, how is it that the people in charge allow this level of incompetence or unprofessionalism to be present in the script, the heart and soul of almost any movie or show?
Then again, I think I may be having some version of Gell-Mann amnesia about the standards of writing in Hollywood, because one of my amusing recurring thoughts is how many people at Lucasfilm & Disney must've read the Rise of Skywalker script and decided that they would proudly work on and forever attach their names to the film that used "somehow" as basically the entirety of the explanation for reviving the main bad guy from the first trilogy.
The standard psychoanalysis review is that stuff like She-Hulk is written by narcissistic women for narcissistic women. Which is an easy/lazy dunk.
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As far as I know screenwriting is a skill that is mostly on the basis of doing what someone else tells you to- in other words, a director or producer or somebody comes up with the plot, characters, vibe, etc, and the actual job of the writer is to ghostwrite the script in a format that makes it easy to film. So the question is why directors and producers are pushing such bad plots and unlikeable characters.
I'm under the impression that directors tend to have fairly limited influence over the more corporate film products (as has always been the case), and the writers we get nowadays are largely just mercenaries answering to the suits. Directors these days probably are more in lock-step with the producers, but that's both because of the insular nature of Hollywood culture and probably also the studios pushing away any directors too cavalier to follow orders.
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But I mean, that is their understanding of the human condition. They tell you every day. It's not immoral to hate your oppressor. The world does need to change. These are their fantasies playing out. I don't think there is anything mysterious or baffling about it. They have no other understanding of the world. Check any of their twitter pages.
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I constantly have this problem as well. For the same reason the successor ideology has destroyed parody, and everything you write comes true two weeks later, they've destroyed villains. I was watching some BBC show about a female doctor who discovers her husband is cheating and knocked up his mistress. She goes completely unhinged, breaks all sorts of laws, nearly forces her ex husband to commit suicide, and I'm watching this wondering if the writers/producers are aware this woman is a psycho? Or are they just "Yass Queen"ing the whole time?
Honestly it's a coin flip. The end of the show seems to show some self awareness that all her actions were ultimately self destructive because now her son wants nothing to do with her. But she kept her job, her house, her friends, etc, unlike the poor ex-husband she utterly destroyed. So yeah, I have no idea.
I wish I could remember the name of that show.
Doctor Foster? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Foster_(TV_series)
Yeah, that's the one.
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