by Brendan Foley
The first season of True Detective took a hyper-speed trip to the top of the TV heap, only to suffer an equally fast, twice as long-lasting backlash that, if the early, vitriolic reviews of Season 2 are to be believed, is still ongoing. The first season snuck up on viewers. The second has had a casting/development process as protracted and heavily documented as comic book blockbusters. And as news dribbled out (“Vince Vaughn to play gangster!” “Huge outdoor orgy scene!” “Mustaches! Good GOD the mustaches!”) the second season of True Detective was already being dissected and castigated before so much as a single frame had been revealed.
It is important going into the season to try and set the background factors of critical conversation aside and just focus on the story that Nic Pizzolatto and his cast and crew have opted to tell over the course of this year’s eight hour season.
This, as it turns out, is easier said than done, as the first episode of True Detective doesn’t tell much of a story whatsoever. It’s an hour long prologue that only settles down to set up our actual story in the final two minutes of the episode. Given just how dense this season appears to be with characters, history, and plot, devoting a significant chunk of time to just introducing our leads might prove to be a very good idea.
So let’s take it lead by lead:
Colin Farrell as Detective Ray Velcoro; a troubled detective. A hard-boozing, hard-hitting corrupt cop, struggling through a divorce and custody battle, Ray Velcoro is what you would get if Rob Zombie decided to remake the Nic Cage Bad Lieutenant, at one point telling a 12 year old that he “buttfuck your father with your mother’s headless corpse.” So… yeah. Ray beats up journalists at the behest of crime kingpins, guzzles booze by the bottle, and has a mustache to make Yosemite Sam weep. Farrell could play this character in his sleep, so credit to him for actually trying. The brogue slips out quite a bit (but then again, “buttfuck” has such a lovely lilt when uttered from betwixt the lips of an Irishman) but Farrell’s a great fit for this kind of macho archetype. A less obvious fit for a macho archetype would be…
Rachel McAdams as Detective Ani Bezzerides; a troubled sheriff. OK, first of all, her name is “Antigone”. Goddamn, motherfucking “Antigone”. And her sister is named “Athena, Goddess of Love” because either Nic Pizzolatto didn’t bother to Google Greek mythology or he intentionally wrote his characters to be dumbasses. Anywho, ‘Ani’ is also hard-living, also troubled, and she spends the episode trying to track down a missing person, a young woman who vanished without a trace from the commune where Ani’s dad (David Morse) is a resident hippie. This will be important. Angry gravitas is a very new suit for McAdams to try on, and very little happens in this episode to suggest the person beneath the raging bluster. Presumably later episodes will dig into what makes Antigone (ugh) tick, and I expect McAdams to make a meal of it. Let’s hope the same can be said for…
Taylor Kitsch as Officer Paul Woodrugh; a troubled highway patrol officer. Look, I love Taylor Kitsch. He’s Riggins. Riggins is awesome. He’s also John Carter. John Carter was not awesome, but that was not Taylor Kitsch’s fault. Kitsch even managed to be watchable in that fucking Wolverine movie, and no one came out looking good from that fucking Wolverine movie, so double points for Taylor Kitsch. I fully expect Kitsch to rock the mic when given the chance, but his character especially is buried beneath the mass of plot and information being dumped on the audience in this first hour. Basically his role is to have a pretty girl try to blow him, then he goes home and a different pretty girl does blow him, and then he tries to kill himself on a motorcycle and instead discovers a corpse. Also he’s covered in scars and has a mysterious past with the army, but the scars aren’t to do with the army, which means this character, one of our leads, has two different mysterious mysteries surrounding his person that will need to be unraveled, alongside the actual, you know, mystery story. Good luck, Riggins. Really hoping you can pull this off. And that goes double for…
Vince Vaughn as Frank Semyon; a troubled criminal. Actually, ‘troubled’ isn’t a totally good descriptor for Frank. From this first hour, he appears to be the only well-balanced and centered lead in the cast. Sure, he’s a crook, but he has what appears to be a happy marriage and is upwardly mobile, as opposed to our law enforcement team, all of whom are floundering in seas of self-loathing and self-destruction. Frank is in the midst of one of those big deals that will bring his criminal enterprise to legitimacy, the kind of deal that you see in every movie ever made. Frank speaks in a very measured cadence, and you can really feel Pizzolatto, the novelist, reaching out through Frank’s dialogue. Or maybe Frank’s cadence stands out so much because it is the first time in a decade-something that Vince Vaughn has been asked to play someone besides Vince Vaughn. It’s a mannered character and performance on a show where everyone else seems to be reaching for volcanic levels of angst, so it stands out all the more.
Not standing out is Kelly Reilly as Frank’s wife, Jordan. Jordan, we see, is an equal partner to Frank’s criminal dealings. They’re trying for a baby via in vitro fertilization, which ties in nicely with Pizzolatto’s normal interest in questions of legacy and masculinity (as if the hour wasn’t filled with enough questions of manliness, it ends with the discovery of a castrated corpse). Only time will tell if Reilly has been given some actual meat to work with, or if she is going to be sidelined ala Michelle Monaghan in the first season.
It’s a much denser start than last year got off to, but it seems like Pizzolatto has actively tried to change up the feel of the show. Gone are the claustrophobic atmospherics, replaced by lingering shots of giant, open highways. Gone are the metaphysical abnormalities, replaced by grit-soaked squalor of entirely human making. Gone are the monologues and declarations, replaced by characters who speak in fragments and snatches before being cut off by either the world or the camera’s cut.
The episode ends with our three cops finally crossing paths, linked by the discovery of a mutilated corpse that will have a great deal of bearing on Frank Semyon’s business. Who killed this guy, who dumped him, how does it tie to the missing woman, to Paul’s scars, to the owl mask we saw in the car?
All I know is that probably Cthulu is no longer a valid answer to any of these questions, as he was last year. And that’s just tragic.