“Thing is, you ain’t that thing no more. What you used to was.”
True Detective season 2 ended up being so bad that it makes me doubt whether or not the first season was actually as amazing as it was or if it was just carried on the backs of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. That isn't to say that the only problem is the casting choices - it might be a step down from those two in a way, but Rachel McAdams is always great, Taylor Kitsch fills his role fine, and Colin Farrell pulls a good performance almost entirely out of his ass. Farrell's Velcoro is a nothing, some terrible approximation of cop character tropes that would have sunk horribly without a skilled actor there to keep it afloat, which is pretty interesting considering he is acting across from Vince Vaughn so often. I say it is interesting not because they have chemistry - they don't - but because Vince Vaughn is also given a terrible character that has to say idiotic things every ten minutes, except the difference is that his performance faceplants like a drunk gymnast. Nic Pizzolatto writes dialog like he has never heard a single human being speak.
None of this is helped by the story either. True Detective season 2 is eight episodes of television with maybe three episodes of actual plot spread between them. Plot elements that feel like they should have taken longer are rushed into an episode or two while parts that should have been developed quickly end up lasting the entire season. Nobody involved in putting this season together seems to have any concept of how pacing should work. Almost nothing of import or interest is verified or revealed until the last three episodes, and in those three episodes those reveals come entirely in clinical spurts of expository dialog. The main characters end up feeling so removed from the story - and from each other - that they sound like robots reciting Wikipedia plot synopses when this happens. When it does all come together and all the characters finally end up intersecting, it is so unfulfilling that you feel like maybe you took a wrong turn on the remote and ended up in a different show. That is almost a compliment in a way though, as the times when season 2 least resembles True Detective and everybody just shuts up - the meth lab shoot out, the penultimate episode, the sudden change of focus in the finale - it almost works. Too bad those moments, few and far between as they are, continually become weighed down under the shambling misshapen beast that is the main narrative. Somehow, and I really have a hard time wrapping my head around this, this show has figured out a way to have very little plot and also be comically overcomplicated.
All of this could have been fine with the right choices in the tone of the show, but those choices were not made. It seems like Pizzolatto has completely and utterly misjudged what it was people enjoyed about the first season, and I don't just mean that because he jettisoned 99.9% of the interesting vague occult stuff. All of the great scenes of interpersonal character development have been replaced by shots of Los Angeles freeways. He saw everybody go wild about Rust Cohle and went "hey why not have an entire cast of fatalist mumblers this time, people will love it!" No Nic, nobody loves it. You wrote the television serial equivalent of a 40 year old dude in a Tapout shirt reading Camus and sniffing a jar of his own farts. The only positive of this season is now we have yet another creator who can be added to the ever growing list of "People Who Should Never Have Complete Creative Control Over Anything." Good job buddy, you will be super happy talking narrative development with George Lucas and Vince Russo at the next meeting.
WATCH if you, for some reason, think there aren't enough overly complicated and paper thin cop dramas about people with dark pasts. DON'T WATCH if you want the first season to remain unsullied.
