HBO's True Detective

I can understand why the show has taken so much heat. It couldn't live up to the first season, and I'd also say that 'Chinatown' is an unfair standard.
But 'Chinatown' is an apt comparison for the themes. Even last season, the weird-fiction, occult elements were simply window dressing. The real theme was the same.
That's why so many people were disappointed with last year's finale. My issue with last year wasn't that we never got to understand the cult surrounding the Yellow King; my disappointment with the first season was Rust's forced epiphany.

This season had too many characters with too much backstory, especially the first-episode's vomiting of exposition.
In the end, I knew a lot about Frank and Woodrugh, too much, and I still didn't care about them. They were superfluous.
Ray's redemption was the main character arc, but in the end I knew more about him than I needed to.
Bezzerides was the most compelling character because I knew less about it her, and her arc traveled the shortest distance. And McAdams really surprised me with how well she stood up in this. I didn't think she had the weight for this, but she was quite good.

 

Buck, I definitely agree with you that expectations were probably too high. However, it's also not like HBO and Nic Pizzolatto were selling this as anything but Very Important Television. It's not like people are shitting all over "Whitney" for not being "Seinfeld." If there is one thing season two of True Detective strove for more than anything else, it was Importance. There was pretty much no levity at all. We had a bunch of Evil Men and a slew of damaged people with Important Problems trying to get to the bottom of Dark Conspiracies. It struck me as a show in love with itself, and the result was a show of muddled quality with some good (McAdams, Ferrell), some bad (poor Vince Vaughn) and plenty of confusing (the seemingly last minute important of the mayor's son and Stan).

 

Levity is definitely not part of the formula. That is true.
Much of TV takes itself too seriously. I want aesthetic quality in my entertainment, but I don't mistake entertainment for art.
I liked it, even though it paled in comparison to Season 1, but Season 1 took criticism as well. If they make a third season, I'd watch it.

 

My main problem wasn't even necessasrily that Vaughn and Farrell got killed off. It's how they got killed off and who killed them.

They were able to be a two-man wrecking crew at the money exchange with the Russians (and let me point out here, by the way, that not all bad guys did win). Farrell's old chief got stabbed/shot to death, and in the previous episode, Taylor Kitsch killed off the rest of that crew. But there was still enough of them left to hunt Farrell. And why did the tall white cop even care to try to hunt down Farrell? His boss is dead. Since Farrell was effectively framed for Kitsch's death, he knew Farrell was going to run. Why bother hunting him down? Just let Farrell leave (or make sure he leaves) the country with the papers.

But the silliest of all to me was how Vaughn died. Vaughn was able to pay off the Mexicans with what money he had left and get them not to kill him. We don't know how far out in the desert the Mexicans drove Vaughn. But I assume it's still in walking distance, even if it would take several hours. Why not just say, "No thanks, I'll keep the suit and walk," or why not just give the guy the suit? Screw it, he knows he has his ticket out of town, and he would be assuming Farrell would make it to Venezula and be able to give him some of the money. Give the guy the suit and get back into town. But no, Vaughn -- who's supposed to have been so cool in heated situations throughout his career -- gets pissed and lunges at the guy while he's surronded.

I'll defend Vaughn for his acting in this show. He was asked to play a wannabe-reformed gangster (don't call him that to his face) with an elborate vocabulary. I thought he did well enough. I blame the stupid parts of the character on the writers. I thought Vaughn did particularly well on the scene with the dead father's kid a few episodes back and in his walk-to-death sequence in the desert. I particularly liked his execution of the "Oh, I guess it was today," line to the head Russian in the finale.

If I was a writer, I would have either just gone the whole way and have the whole crew (McAdams, Farrell, Vaughn) get shot on the boat on the way out of town, or have them all escape. Let them get to Venezula and live the rest of there lives looking over their shoulder, while business as usual goes on in Vinci.

 

"Remember that time those guys used a nail gun on my head? That's why they call me Nails."

(I don't recall if the phrasing was that bad, but it may as well have been).

 

I've really been pondering this, and reading some reviews, which I don't normally do much.
It is hard for me to explain what I liked about this season.

I don't think the writing was bad, as I've seen alleged all over the place.
I like the dark, opaque, arcane, dense world that is created. I like the deeply flawed characters seeking redemption by trying to pierce that world and achieve something good, and I like that their victories are so minor compared to what is really going on just out of sight.
I guess it resonates with me.

I see Rachel McAdams escape with the baby as less offensive hopeful element at the end than Rust's conversion at the end of Season 1.
The hopefulness at the end of Season 1 really bothered me. This ending much less so.

Ultimately, the Woodrugh character should have been cut out, and I don't think Vaughn was up to the material.

But I've been thinking about sgreenwell's comments, and I think he really hit on something the season lacked compared to the first - levity.
There were genuinely amusing moments in Season 1. Rust's full-0f-himself verbosity was laughable, and it was handled so well. The interplay between the two cops was often humorous.

Vaughn was the only one asked to drop the occasional purple line of dialog this time, and he was so sickeningly earnest about it.

Levity, my man, you said it. The more I've thought about it, the more I see it, or the lack of it.

I hope it comes back for Season 3.

 

Buck, I definitely get the feeling that the small, tiny bits of humor in S1 were probably entirely of the two leads' doing. Especially with Woody, who always comes off as wryly funny to me in all of his roles, even when he's playing a horrible womanizer and damaged cop. I think they had the clout and the pull to get that kept in for S1, whereas for S2, it just feels like Nic Pizzolatto controlled everything. At least, that would be my "complete outsider" guess, because of the super overwrought and Important dialogue.

 

I'm still trying to recover from this line:

"Never do anything out of hunger. Not even eating."

 

Not big into philosophy?

 

You could be right. I've seen thing written about tension between the creator and the S1 director. That might have been one of the points of contention.
Certainly McConaughey's portrayal was self-aware of Rust's own absurdity. The character didn't get it, and McConaughey wasn't mocking the character, but it was in the portrayal nonetheless. Vaughn' ham-fisted earnestness only serves to highlight how good McConaughey was with the material.

And as you mention, Harrellson ability to react to the Rust character's nonsense was fantastic. Again, not mocking the material but handling it with a real sense of the absurdity of it.

 

I went out and got the season 2 box set. I haven't seen the episodes since they originally aired, so my recollection is this stream of consciousness: that it's overly serious, I remember a lot of character traits and some over-the-top lines, Conway Twitty, Velcorostache, hot redhead lady, drunken mayor, sex party, bird head, fat ginger boy, middle age Jesus guru, were there Russians?, a lot of people die, Vince Vaughn walks in the desert, I don't know what the actual plot was and what bad things really important people were doing that put the show's story in motion.

I'll report back on how acurate that was at some point.

 

Various entertainment sites are reporting it's unlikely there will be a Season 3. I noticed the other day that on an ad for HBO Go it was touting "every episode" for current series such as Game Of Thrones and Veep, but True Detective was labeled "complete series" along with cancelled shows such as Deadwood and Rome.