Fans of True Detective could be forgiven mixed feelings as season two of HBO’s psychometric cop drama looms. Starring a never-better Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, the first series was perfect, more or less (assuming you don’t have issues with the RELATIVELY conventional ending). Here was the televisual equivalent of bottled lightening – a freaky alignment of great storytelling, molasses-dense ambiance and genius casting. Second time around, anticlimax is surely inevitable?
Curiously, the brace of trailers HBO has put out ahead of season two have neither assuaged
fans nor filled them with dread. What the spots essentially confirm is that True Detective 2.0 will be different in many ways – yet familiar in others. There is a change of location – noirish Los Angeles, land of a thousand overpasses, supplanting the verdant fever-dream of rural Louisiana.
But, judged strictly by the promo, it is obvious that True Detective’s distinctive sensibility – a slow-burn dread with one foot in the supernatural – endures (no matter that the show’s creator, Nick Pizzolatto has insisted there will be no juju weirdness this time). And, once again, the key players are variously damaged, haunted and compromised – much as McConaughey’s Ruste Cohle and Harrelson’s Marty Hart were first time out.
Rocking an unnerving method actor moustache, Colin Farrell looks persuasively beaten-down as Ray Velcoro, a police officer who has compromised his ethics once too often and can’t pull back from the moral abyss. There’s also Vince Vaughan and his trusty double chin – they team up as Frank Semyon, a cynical businessman who has unleashed powers beyond his control, and Rachel McAdams, lived-in and careworn as Ani Bezzerides, an upstanding police officer with a secret gambling problem.
So far, so dark and miserable. However, what season two will apparently lack is an overtly occult element. At first blush, this feels a mistake. One reason True Detective series one had such an impact is that it introduced a mainstream audiences to the skin-crawling delights of supernatural writers such as HP Lovecraft, August Derleth, Brian Lumley etc and explicitly referenced the Cthulhu mythos figure The King In Yellow (originally created by 19th century pulp author Robert M Chambers and co-opted into Lovecraft as an avatar of Hastur, the monstrous ruler of a far-flung star system with dark designs on earth).
Much as Game Of Thrones has alerted viewers to the thrills of swords and sorcery – a genre many of would otherwise have been too sniffy to investigate – True Detective distilled the essence of authors such as Lovecraft and made their existential dread a defining sensibility. Without it, frankly, TD would have probably been just another troubled-men narrative, spiced up with the occasional action scene.
The question, then, is whether True Detective season two can cut it without the dark weirdness that dazzled us first time out. Pizzolatto has insisted he’ll mostly be playing it straight and has retreated from an early promise that s.2 would concern an “occult conspiracy” at the heart of the American transportation system.
“There’s definitely bad men and hard women, but no secret occult history of the US transportation system,” he said earlier this year. “That was a comment from very early in the process, and something I ended up discarding in favour of closer character work and a more grounded crime story. The complexity of the historical conspiracy first conceived detracted from the characters and their reality, I felt, and those characters are ultimately what have to shape the world and story. So I moved away from that.”
It is possible this is cunning misdirection on his behalf, a canny dampening of expectations so that True Detective 2.0 does not arrive on wave of hype it cannot possibly live up to. Some digging, for instance, reveals an occult-style murder will, indeed, be the driving force behind the narrative, with a powerful businessman found dead in a Satanic sexual ritual gone wrong.
“While there’s nothing occult in this season,” said Pizzolatto, in a separate statement. “I think there’s a disconcerting psychology to this world, and its characters have other kinds of uncanny reality with which to contend.”
Eh, “Uncanny Reality”...Sounds like another way of saying “supernatural”, doesn’t it? Perhaps what Pizzolatto was getting at was that the specific gothic sensibility of season one had been dispensed with. And this makes sense. Los Angeles, home of noir, isn’t the rural South – one wouldn’t expect the series to replicate that geographically specific air of feverish gloom.
The gothic horror suggested by Louisiana’s coastal landscape didn’t feel appropriate in this place,” agreed Pizzolatto in an address last month. “These new landscapes have their own unique voice and their own unsettling qualities. While there’s nothing occult in this season, I think there’s a disconcerting psychology to this world, and its characters have other kinds of uncanny reality with which to contend.
“We were conscious of not wanting to repeat ourselves or remake the same album in a different setting, but I try to be open to whatever structure the story and characters suggest, so I never drew a line through those things. As the characters multiplied and their individual and group complications grew, a more integrated and linear structure worked best. And there was the conviction that if we were to do something entirely new, then we shouldn’t lean on past conceits, but really build from scratch.”
Tonality aside, the focus ahead of the new series has been in the cast – in particular Farrell as a compromised cop who’s trousered one brown envelope too many. Though precluded from providing much in the way of detail, the Dubliner has spoken of the character in terms that suggest he will be this year’s Rust Cohle – an anti-hero we can’t get enough of.
“He’s somebody who like many of us in life is wrestling with events that took place in his past, and is trying to move forward from them, but trapped in this continual cycle of behavior he can’t get out of. I think fundamentally he’s a good man that made some very bad choices.”
“Aesthetically, it’s very different,” he said of season two. “There are four main characters, as opposed to the two-character structure that’s in the first piece. But it’s a lot of the same sensibilities, and a lot of the characters are struggling with the same kind of existential quandaries and questions that are related to meaning and purpose and the burying of the darkness that may be in your past.”
The show starts with a grisly murder, Farrell has revealed, “but I think it’s more to do with what’s happening with the characters than the solving of a murder, which is what I kind of felt about the first year anyway. So hopefully people respond to it. You never know. But it was a blast to work on. It was such good material, and such a wonderful cast of characters.”