HBO's True Detective

This

 

So am I the only one here who finds Rust's philosophizing quite tiresome? It annoyed me so much, I would have considered giving up on the show after three episodes if I hadn't heard such rave reviews about episodes four and five. Thankfully, those were by far the best of the season and I'm hooked, but I'm still not loving it the way others are.

I think it could have been stronger if they edited the first five episodes into four. Episodes two and three each had quite a few scenes that could have been cut and made it so they weren't hitting the nihilism over our heads as much.

 

Seeing how it's the whole point of the show, I'm guessing the answer to your question is, "yes."

 

I think the genius of the show is that it can be watched as a straight procedural without any deeper grasp of the larger philosophical theories, or one can dive deeply into the mysteries of time and space and storytelling allusions to literature and supernatural and such. Rust is a great character because we never know if he's a little crazy, or of he's playing a little crazy to serve a greater purpose, or if he's a genius who is one step ahead of everyone.

Another reason I enjoy this show is it has poked real holes in the recapping style of television criticism that has become the norm. You would never review a novel after reading 100 pages, but that's what a lot of people tried to do with TD, make definitive statements about it when it was purposefully only showing you a sliver of the narrative.

Last night was just filling in some gaps without moving the story forward too much, but that's fine. It's all part of the ride.

 

The New Yorker weighs in, and the New Yorker is not impressed.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2014/03/03/140303crte_television_nussbaum

The story in one sentence

 

I get that, and I'm definitely going to wait until the end to see how it all fits together. Having said that, I'm closer to this reading of the show from Alex Pappademas on Grantland's precap than I am to those who think it's one of the best shows to come around in a long time:

"For the first four episodes, this show looked an awful lot like an overwrought cop drama with award-bait cinematography, prosey MFA-workshop dialogue, laughably anemic supporting characters, and two redemptively great performances by Harrelson and McConaughey; about the only thing that’s clear to me after the fifth episode is that it’s not just that.

It’s even been suggested to me that some of the flaws I just cited are there by design — that the two-dimensionality of everyone and everything in the landscape except Rust and Marty is proof the show is a deconstruction of the age-old story about cops consumed by their toughest case. That sounds awfully convenient to me, a No-Prize-worthy way to explain away Pizzolatto’s inability to write women."

Although, I am mostly fine with the character outside of Rust and Marty being two-dimensional since this is a story about them, and it's only eight episodes.

 

That sounds a lot like my initial impression of "Breaking Bad," after the first season. Two characters of any depth. Terrible women characters. But with that show, at least, there was room to grow, beyond just the first batch of episodes.

I like "True Detective," though. And I like the one-season, one-story commitment. A lot of shows lose steam - "LOST" is the shining example - when they have to keep coming up with new stories to tell.

 

The criticism about the women on this show not being deep misses one of the points of the show. One thing that the writer has said he's trying to show is how men hurt women. Part of that is by trivializing them to make it easier to do things like kill them or cheat on them like Marty does.

Sure, this could be a copout by the writer to cover for not being able to write female characters, but when you have a deep story to tell in eight episodes, you can't afford to flesh out every character. In this case, two characters are getting developed and everyone else is just window dressing to that end. I think we'll see more of Marty's wife in the next couple of episodes, but I don't think she'll be nearly as developed as Marty and Rust. And she shouldn't be.

A lot of this criticism, I've noticed, has come from female critics who seem to think if a show doesn't have a strong female lead, it's a waste of time, which is unfair to some shows. They think if a show portrays a woman as a victim, it's just misogyny. Well, guess what -- in the real world, sometimes women are victims. And sometimes their weak. Not every female character needs to be strong. Sometimes, the story will dictate a character -- male or female -- be weak or one-dimensional.

Yes, it happens more often with women. But if someone wants to make an argument about chauvinism in the TV industry, that's a different argument altogether. For this show, reducing the majority of the female characters to one dimension fits with the idea of showing how men objectify women and hurt them.

 

I've talked to people who claim that "Mad Men" is "sexist" because of the way women are treated. Not that the show portrays sexism, which is accurate. But that the show itself is sexist.

Reminiscent of former poster Bodie's famous claim here that "All in the Family" was a "racist show."

 

Hated last night's episode.
We needed the backstory on Rust and Marty's falling out, about the breakup of Marty's marriage and the transition to current time in the narrative.
However, that doesn't excuse making a boring episode.

Very disappointing.

It dawned on me last night: I'm not sure this show, with two episodes left, can cash in on it's promise.

 

Art does not need to be fair, or balanced. This idea that we must shoehorn things into shows to satisfy certain people's progressive desires is assinie. I saw two weeks ago where the TV critic from ThinkProgress was ripping TD for not spending more time humanizing the biker gang and drug dealers of episode five. I mean, Jesus, how ridiculous can you be?

 

It's a TV show. It's not art.
It has to entertain. That is the reason is exists.