[COLUMN] Welcome to the Era of IP TV | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

True Detective: Night County was Night Country before it was True Detective.

Writer and director Issa López approached HBO with a pitch for an original miniseries that would be set in the darkest regions of Alaska. HBO responded enthusiastically, but had one major request. They wanted to fold López’s concept under the umbrella of the True Detective brand, allowing Night Country to serve as the fourth season of the anthology show that had launched a decade ago. It would also be the first season not written and directly overseen by creator Nic Pizzolatto.

HBO spent decades establishing itself as a quality brand. It boasted in publicity, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO.” Free of the constraints of broadcast censorship, the cable network could take bold chances on creator-led projects like David Chase’s The Sopranos, David Milch’s Deadwood and David Simon’s The Wire. Through shows like these, HBO laid the foundations of what came to be known as “the Golden Age of Television”, leading other broadcasters to produce shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men.

For decades, television had been treated as a “vast wasteland”, inherently less prestigious than cinema because of the formal, budgetary, and content constraints. However, as four-quadrant blockbusters squeezed mid-budget adult-skewing fare out of theatres in the early years of the new millennium, a lot of that prestige migrated to television. In some cases, this process was literal. Before Succession was a HBO show, it was a feature film called The Murdochs.

Movie stars who would have seen television as a demotion just years prior flocked from the silver screen to a smaller screen: Kate Winslet in Mildred Pierce, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep in Big Little Lies, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in Ballers. The first three seasons of True Detective attracted Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Mahershala Ali, Oscar nominees Woody Harrelson and Colin Farrell, and stars like Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn.

In this radically altered landscape, HBO was the benchmark for prestige television. When Netflix fired the starting pistol on the streaming arms race with the launch of House of Cards in February 2013, they had a specific competitor in their sights. “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us,” explained Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos. However, by 2013, the Golden Age of television was fading. HBO was in the process of changing and shifting.

That year, Breaking Bad wrapped up and Mad Men launched its bifurcated final season. In July, Brett Martin published his seminal history of the era, Difficult Men, which aimed to mythologize the creators of the period like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls had done for the great directors of the 1970s. Indeed, as if to cement that this era was truly over, Biskind published Pandora’s Box just last year, his own account of the rise and fall of prestige and streaming television.

At HBO, those early television auteurs struggled to replicate their success. Running for a single season, David Milch’s John from Cincinnati was an embarrassing oddity. Milch followed up with Luck, another single-season show that became a costly fiasco. Between 2013 and 2014, HBO wrapped up a wave of high-profile shows that had failed to connect with audiences: David Simon’s Treme, Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire, and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. These were all shortened seasons.

However, the broadcaster was enjoying a great deal of success with an entirely different sort of show. Game of Thrones was an expensive fantasy epic based on existing intellectual property. It wasn’t a hugely mainstream brand before the show launched, but it was not an original creation. It was also overseen by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, two writers who – by Benioff’s own admission - “had never done TV and […] didn’t have any experience.” However, by 2013, Game of Thrones was a hit.

Premiering in January 2014, True Detective smashed into the collective consciousness with the force of Detective Rust Cohle (McConaughey) dramatically crushing a beer can. It came out of nowhere, earning rave reviews and entrancing audiences. Over the course of that first season, the show’s audience grew from 2.33m to 3.52m. It became the most-watched first-year series in the history of HBO. There was so much demand for the season finale that it crashed the HBO Go app.

The show picked up 12 Emmy nominations, a tally only beaten by the final season of Breaking Bad. It won five. This was a particularly impressive accomplishment for Nic Pizzolatto, a short-story writer and English professor whose only prior screen experience was a stint on the writing staff of The Killing that left him “really dissatisfied.” Pizzolatto wrote every episode of the season. He was praised in contemporary reviews for his “genius” and lauded as “the hottest new showrunner in Hollywood.”

However, there was trouble behind the scenes. There were allegations of plagiarism, which Pizzolatto denied. Pizzolatto wrote the entire season, but it was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. While Fukunaga won an Emmy for his direction, Pizzolatto did not win one for writing. The series returned for a second season without Fukunaga, and with Pizzolatto asserting complete control. Critics interpreted the introduction of a control-mad Hollywood director in the second season as a swipe at Fukunaga, something Pizzolatto denies.

The second season of True Detective swapped the first season’s rural gothic aesthetic for weird L.A. vibes. Pizzolatto’s writing veered into self-parody, with Vince Vaughn’s crime boss solemnly telling Colin Farrell’s corrupt cop that his inability to identify his enemy “stymies [his] retribution. It’s like blue balls in your heart.” Few shows experience such a sharp fall from grace. The audience dropped from 3.17m for the premiere to 2.17m for the finale. It picked up a single Emmy nomination.

With critics deriding the second season as a prime illustration of “the dangers of auteur TV”, the show’s third season was an attempt to right the ship. Pizzolatto took on assistance from Milch, returned the show to its rural setting, and told a more streamlined and less stylized story. This went a long way to winning back critics and awards voters, securing nine Emmy nominations and no wins. However, it couldn’t bring back viewers. The average viewership for the third season was just 1.25m.

During this period, Hollywood was going through a larger restructuring. HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros., bounced between corporate partners like AT&T and Discovery, with each change in management bringing with a set of different priorities. Under AT&T, HBO was a cornerstone of the multimedia brand, with the company’s streaming platform labelled “HBO Max.” However, after the merger with Discovery, HBO was dropped from the title, with the service simply named “Max.”

Much as had happened in mainstream cinema, this consolidation brought with it a push for established brands. The streaming gold rush was winding down. The era of “peak television”, in which services could afford to take bigger risks on higher quantities of content, was over. Just as big budget franchises had taken over the multiplex, television networks came to favor familiar names that were easier to sell to audiences.

Long respected for its prestige, HBO became an intellectual property stud farm. The Sopranos led to a theatrical prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. Sex and the City begat a streaming sequel series, … And Just Like That. Game of Thrones spawned House of the Dragon, with more in the works. On the recently rebranded Max, shows like Peacemaker, The Penguin, and The Prophecy spun out of Warners movies like The Suicide Squad, The Batman, and Dune. Last year, the service’s biggest show was a video game adaptation.

While some of these properties are creative-led, with James Gunn being in charge of both The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, many of them are more troubled. Terence Winter was supposed to run a spin-off from The Batman, but left due to “creative differences.” Director Johan Renck and star Shirley Henderson both left The Prophecy when it was still known as The Sisterhood, a few months after showrunner Diane Ademu-John’s departure. House of the Dragon has had similar creative turmoil.

Recent years have also seen HBO struggling with creatives. While there are still creator-driven shows on the broadcaster, like Mike White’s The White Lotus, there have been a number of high-profile controversies. Director Andrea Arnold departed the second season of Big Little Lies when she felt that she was unable to put her own mark on the series. Last year, HBO’s biggest embarrassment was The Idol, a show that imploded after it was taken over by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson.

In this context, the True Detective brand had value far beyond its association with Pizzolatto, who has failed to gain traction outside of the show. He parted ways with HBO to develop a show called Redeemer with Matthew McConaughey at rival FX. When that fell through, he began developing a western at Amazon. It seems safe to admit that Pizzolatto’s career has never really taken off in the way that one might expect given the success of True Detective.

In February 2021, HBO Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys suggested that True Detective “would be interesting with a new voice”, with rumors pointing to writers like Levinson and Lucia Puenzo. In the end, HBO asked Issa López to fold her original idea for Night Country into the larger True Detective brand. The results are interesting. It is clear that López has her own distinct interests, quite apart from those that drive Pizzolatto’s writing. However, it also feels a little bit like True Detective karaoke.

There is a lot to like in Night Country. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis work well. The Alaskan setting allows the show to explore themes of environmental exploitation and violence against indigenous women. López’s resolution, in particular, stands apart from anything that Pizzolatto has written. However, the show also feels like a nostalgic checklist of imagery from the popular first season: a recurring spiral pattern, some tentacle monster graffiti, an explicit reminder that “time is a flat circle.”

It’s worth acknowledging that this isn’t necessarily a value judgement. Many of these shows are legitimately great. House of the Dragon, Peacemaker, and The Last of Us count among the very best television produced in the past couple of years. Outside of HBO, creator Noah Hawley’s work at FX, driven by established properties like Fargo and Legion, is fantastic. Even Night Country itself is very good. However, there is a sense of a larger trend at work, pushing the industry in a particular direction. It’s worth acknowledging what this trend is and what it means.

Over the past few years, industry analysts have wondered what will follow “peak TV”, the creative and commercial boom that saw more money and more chances pumped into the industry. If the past few years of HBO are any indication of wider cultural trends – and they are arguably reflected by recent decisions at places like Amazon and Apple – it looks like “peak TV” might beget “IP TV.” What happened in cinema is happening in television. Maybe time truly is a flat circle.