I'm Never One to Yuck Somebody Else's Yum, But True Detective Has Always Been Horseshit
"you're in Carcosa, by which I mean an inbred Southern guy's backyard stick fort!"
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HBO’s new season of its prestige-heavy, satisfying-conclusions-light cop series has come to a close. And True Detective: This Time With Ladies proved to be just like every other season, which is to say that it paired high-powered movie stars and meticulous production values with a palpably disappointing empty hole of a central mystery and lots of absurd posturing about a quasi-mystical backstory that it never bothers to really explain. The show gets a little better, it gets a little worse, but it’s always an expression of these dynamics - beautifully made horseshit, mystery boxes with nothing inside, fans with expectations that are so outsized they can never be met. Most certainly including the much-ballyhooed original season from 2014.
It’s true folks: I think every season of True Detective so far has been bad, most certainly including the first. Throughout, the show’s been a triumph of high budgets, beautiful camera work, and gaudy casting wedded to endless plot conveniences, vaguely supernatural mythology that amounts to nothing, and laughably bad mysteries. The conventional wisdom now is that the first season is a classic, with the second (especially) and third seasons disappointing relative to that bar. Which is strange, because people widely understood the ending of the first season to be a letdown at the time. It’s only due to the odd way that art gains or loses esteem over time that so many people now casually accept the series as a masterpiece. The end of the fourth season, another immaculately-made bunch of hooey, is the only excuse I need to be a hater make the critical case. True Detective is the most obvious example of Prestige Disease I’ve ever seen - where the credentials of the people involved and the extravagant budgets and the trappings of artistic seriousness overwhelm actual artistic concerns like plot sense, thematic coherence, and meaningful characterization. And I for one am willing to say so despite a lot of bullies on social media insisting that all decent people must love this show.