True Detective is again. Wait. What’s True Detective?
It’s been practically 10 years since HBO launched audiences to True Detective in Jan. 2014. A TV present with a reputation so goofy that it completely had to be good for anybody to take it significantly, the primary season of creator Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology drama was hanging in its pairing of a resurgent Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in a homicide thriller with an eerie Weird Fiction subtext and an all-timer title sequence.
Successive seasons of True Detective did not be a sensation the way in which its award-winning first was. After a much-delayed third season arrived in 2019, the collection was successfully placed on ice, and Pizzolatto’s working relationship with HBO got here to an finish (whereas one other one at FX did not even take off).
HBO, nonetheless, nonetheless believes within the magic of that first season sufficient to place some juice behind a brand new installment. While it’s doubtless meant to standalone like different True Detective seasons, Night Country — which stars Jodie Foster as Detective Liz Danvers and Kali Reis as her reluctant associate Detective Evangeline Navarro on the hunt for males lacking from an Arctic analysis station — is certainly attempting to woo again followers.
The trailer for True Detective: Night Country is full of callbacks to season 1, in methods which might be structural (a cop being interviewed a few harrowing case), stylistic (darkish and moody broad photographs with the suggestion of the supernatural) and textual (the spooky spiral from the primary season is again).
The trailer works laborious to make these connections extraordinarily apparent — the spiral was a bit of Lovecraftian symbolism that stood in for the crime ring that season 1 protagonists Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Harrelson) observe down collectively. The spiral was additionally invoked in season 3, itself an try to return to the present to its roots after a wildly unpopular second season.
But on-line, viewers of the trailer also noticed that there is perhaps extra to Night Country’s season 1 ties than spooky symbolism: The story is about in Alaska, and in season 1’s fourth episode, “Who Goes There,” Rust Cohle claims he went there to go to a dying father that nobody can verify was ever there.
Little tidbits like this are what made True Detective successful: On its face, it was a seedy crime drama, however it was additionally one constructed for the fan principle period, sprinkling in ominous references to Weird Fiction works like Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 work The King in Yellow, which, relying in your perspective, enriched the collection or in the end proved to be a waste of time.
That is in the end what everybody, from HBO to on a regular basis followers, hope True Detective: Night Country delivers: An engrossing thriller to invest about, and pore over each body of. Hopefully showrunner Issa López and producer Barry Jenkins discover that magic once more. Yellowjackets can’t do all of it by itself.
True Detective: Night Country will premiere on HBO and stream on Max “later this year.”
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