Despite an A-list cast and a memorably eerie marketing campaign, the first season of True Detective snuck up on viewers who tuned in with no idea of what to expect from the HBO anthology series that had somehow attracted world-class acting talent.
For his second go-round, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t have to worry about attracting an audience, but instead faces the unenviable challenge of living up to the expectations of his own cultish following.
True Detective is attempting something almost unprecedented in modern television, as while there are other series that take up different settings and storylines with each season, they tend to hold on to some constants in hopes of reminding viewers of what show they’re watching.
(The importance of Jessica Lange’s role on the first four seasons of American Horror Story, for example, cannot be overstated.)
Pizzolatto has no interest in coddling his audience with a callback to Rust Cohle’s boozy philosophizing, and instead passes the torch to an entirely different group of morally compromised cops and robbers without so much as a glance back at where he came from.
The question of whether or not he pulls it off is thus far more perplexing than any murder mystery encountered by the new recruits.
From the start, it’s clear that while it won’t have any direct plot ties to its forerunner, True Detective Season 2 is very much interested in the same questions and themes that made the first installment such a memorable departure from the cop show norm.
Once again, we have troubled law enforcers attempting to escape dark pasts through liquor, sex and fanatical commitment to their jobs.
This time, however, instead of an unlikely pair of buddy cops, we have the requisite grizzled veteran (Colin Farrell), and a pair of dedicated loose cannons (Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch), whose paths all converge in the episode’s final moments, just as the season’s central mystery begins to come into focus (no pun intended) thanks to an eyeless corpse.
Thrown into the mix as a fourth central character is Vince Vaughn’s mobster-turned-land-developer who embodies the cliches of both the bad guy attempting to go straight and the criminal with a cleaner conscience than the cops.
It’s too soon to say if the central storyline will hold the same sway as last season’s red herring-laden search for the Yellow King (A twisty mystery that many viewers felt failed to deliver in the end.), but that’s almost immaterial, as yet again, Pizzolatto is more focused on the men and women who solve the crimes than on the crimes themselves.
The matter of whether or not the first episode "works" depends on your tolerance for highfalutin dialogue delivered by surprisingly eloquent thugs ("Behold, what was once a man," Vaughn’s character says while observing himself in a mirror.) and pulpy shocks that border on schlock. (Farrell beats up the father of his son’s bully and screams threats so ridiculous that they cross the line into unintentional comedy.)
Unfortunately for Pizzolatto and company, the noirish elements that made the first season so addictively compelling too often seem forced or laughably trite this time around.
That’s not to say we won’t be turning in next week to find out where this tour of LA’s underbelly will take us.
As with the first season, the characters and their enigmatic pasts are thus far more compelling than the central whodunit, and that may be the biggest thing that sets True Detective apart from the standard procedural fare, as well as the best reason to remain optimistic about the future of the series.
If this new crop of – in Pizzolatto’s words – "hard women and bad men" can manage to remain as compelling and maddeningly mysterious as their predecessors (and maybe dial down the pulpy bravado just a tad), we’re happy to take another trip back to the crime scene, even if the specifics feel a bit familiar.
After all, to quote our favorite Lone Star-fuelled philosopher, time is a flat circle.
If you missed last night’s premiere or just want to pass through again in search of clues, you can watch True Detective online at TV Fanatic.