I finally managed to choke down the last episode of True Detective Season Two and I’m glad. I’m glad it’s finally over. Have you ever repeatedly hit yourself in the face with a hammer? What a slog. Season One is some of the finest television I’ve ever seen. Season Four has moments but was ultimately a letdown, perhaps as I watched it directly after True Detective Season One that is to be expected.
Season Two. What to say? I’ll give it a firm do not recommend. It has a fine cast including Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, and Vince Vaugn but they just can’t overcome the morose writing and directing.
What is True Detective Season Two About?
Darned good question. I’ve seen it and I’m pretty much in the dark. A financier guy who has a bunch of mob money meant to be invested in the high-speed rail project in California gets killed. From there, you’ll need a flow chart.
There are some blue diamonds from a robbery years ago with corrupt cops, vengeful orphans, Russian mobsters, Mexican Mobsters, Arabic Mobsters, corrupt politicians, a new age touchy feely dad, a homosexual war hero with a girlfriend, a corrupt cop, other corrupt cops, corrupt land evaluators, a singer in a nightclub who is a Venezuelan human trafficker, a psychiatrist is also a human trafficker but the bad kind, not the nice kind, sex workers, a black guy who is in charge but I don’t have any idea who he is, a white guy who is friends with the homosexual guy but isn’t. Hell, I have no idea. I lost track of it somewhere around episode three and never got it back.
Relief. Any Relief. Please.
About two thousand years ago some playwrights came up with the idea of comic relief. Shakespeare knew about it. It’s generally considered useful. The people who wrote this mess figured, nah, over-rated. What they figure we want to see are scenes where two people talk to each other in gravelly voices, enunciating each word slowly with the pretentious vocabulary of a dandy Harvard English Professor.
To spice things up between these interminable conversations they throw in an implausible shootout. I use the word implausible generously.
The show is absolutely relentless in its humorless, overly dramatic tone. It never stops. It’s like the Terminator. It will not stop until you are bored and looking at funny cat videos on TikTok, and even then, it will keep going.
Please, you’ll beg, just one joke. A funny line. A prat. I mishap. Anything. Please. For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I just want to smile once, I don’t even need to laugh, something, anything. A dad joke. A knock-knock joke. Denied! Or, in the language of the show; A predilection for humorous anecdotes is not my natural inclination.
Acting
I can’t blame the actors, it’s clearly the directing. I’ve read the producer of True Detective Season One was given total control of Season Two. Absolute power doesn’t end well. Poor Vince Vaugn has to deliver those awful lines in one slowly spoken conversation after the next. He’s been labeled as miscast but I don’t think it’s his fault. He does the best he can with what he’s got.
Colin Farrell’s son is clearly cast for a single purpose and they think it’s subverting expectations when it turns out to be false in the end. I saw that one coming from episode one and anyone who didn’t just wasn’t watching closely.
Stylish
The show is stylish to a fault. Every camera shot is perfectly diagrammed. Every background meticulously crafted. We get wide-angle shots, close-ups, deserts, cityscapes, redwoods. It’s all beautiful and gritty but it doesn’t seem real. It seems like a student film made by someone who worshipped Alfred Hitchcock but skipped all the other classes.
The Music
Overbearing. Even if a scene doesn’t seem tense, the music tells us it will be soon. The music doesn’t enhance here, it leads the mood. You know exactly what is going to happen when the music starts playing in almost every scene.
Conclusion
I could go on. I won’t. Avoid this. A confusing, overbearing, mess.
Tom Liberman