[COLUMN] The Second Season of True Detective Traded Cosmic Horror for Apocalyptic L.A. Noir | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

It is perhaps an understatement to describe the second season of True Detective as “deeply flawed.” The reaction at the time was catastrophic, citing the season as a prime example of “the dangers of auteur TV.”

From the outset, the production faced an uphill battle. Not only did it follow one of the best-received seasons of television in recent memory, it was rushed into production. Former HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo would acknowledge that, seeking to capitalize on the first season’s success, the channel pushed showrunner Nic Pizzolatto “to deliver, in a very short time frame, something that became very challenging to deliver.”

There were also creative concerns. The entirety of the first season of True Detective had been directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. This was undeniably a large part of the show’s appeal, as demonstrated by the famous tracking shot at the center of the season and by the fact that Fukunaga’s direction took home an Emmy and Pizzolatto’s writing did not. Pizzolatto and Fukunaga were reportedly at odds, and Fukunaga did not return for the second season.

The second season recruited impressive directors, like Justin Lin and John Crowley. However, there was a sense in which Pizzolatto had assumed complete creative control of the show and nobody was in any position to challenge or assist him. As if to underscore this point, the second season includes a brief appearance from a Hollywood director (Philip Moon) that many critics acknowledged as a passive-aggressive dig at Fukunaga on the part of the showrunner, something Pizzolatto denied.

There was also a sense that the second season was trapped by the first season’s success. Although the first season featured phenomenal turns from Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, there was a tendency to focus on McConaughey. The season was situated as part of “the McConaissance” and McConaughey’s character provided ample fodder for memes. In contrast, Harrelson’s more grounded (and grounding) performance tended to be unfairly overlooked.

As a result, it was no surprise that every major character on the second season felt much more like McConaughey’s Rust Cohle than Harrelson’s Marty Hart: the closeted war veteran Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), the abuse survivor Antigone "Ani" Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), the gangster-going-straight Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), and the drug-and alcohol-addled failed father Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell). These were all grim philosophizing types, with nobody to curb their pretension.

There was also the shift in genre. The first season had blended pulp detective fiction with weird horror. In contrast, Pizzolatto pitched the second season towards surreal Los Angeles noir. It is a reliable genre with a long history. After all, Ani was named for A.I. Bezzerides, the screenwriter of Kiss Me Deadly. Mayor Austin Chessani’s (Ritchie Coster) dead body is found in his pool, an allusion to Sunset Boulevard. There are plenty of obvious antecedents for this sort of story, particularly the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice.

Indeed, the second season of True Detective was massively indebted to David Lynch, prominently featuring a sign for “Mulholland Drive” in its first episode and styling the man who assaulted Ani (Rodger Halston) to look like “BOB” (Frank Silva) from Twin Peaks. This isn’t a bad thing. Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century to date. In some sense, the second season of True Detective prefigures what Lynch would do with Twin Peaks: The Return.

There is an incredible degree of difficulty involved in telling a story like this, particularly stretched over a season of television. Convolution and obfuscation is a feature of the “weird Los Angeles noir”, to the point that when Raymond Chandler was asked who actually murdered the chauffeur in his novel The Big Sleep, the author replied, “I don’t know.” That confusion and ambiguity can be maintained for a few hours, but sustaining it over months strains an audience’s goodwill.

The plot of the second season of True Detective makes about as much sense as any other entry in the genre, even if it requires a 3,500-word explainer article to lay it all out straight. The second season reinforces this idea through its visual language. It is punctuated with establishing shots of highways cutting through the city, tangled up in spaghetti junctions that “amplify the abstract nature of the landscape.” Much of the season unfolds in industrial spaces where pipes overlap and intertwine.

Although wildly different from the previous season in terms of plot, genre, and tone, Pizzolatto structures the second season of True Detective as an echo of what came before. As in the first season, the lead has a chance encounter with the killer in the third episode. As in the first season, the fourth episode climaxes with a horrific gunfight in a populated area. As in the first season, the aftermath of that violence is used as an excuse to prematurely close down the investigation.

Throughout its first three seasons, True Detective suggests that industrialization is inherently destructive, that this sort of exploitation creates environments hostile to human beings. In the first season, local oil refineries loom large in the background as if stalking Cohle and Hart across Louisiana, while the wealthy prey on the poor and the weak. Much of the third season is about the influence that the Hoyt Food Company exerts over the local community.

In the second season, the fictional town of Vinci serves as the show’s nexus. “It started out as a vice haven in the early 1900s,” explains Katherine Davis (Michael Hyatt). “Went industrial in the '20s. Pushed out residents from manufacturing zones. Worst air polluter in the state. Annually emits or processes 27 million pounds of toxic waste.” Vinci is based on Vernon, a real-life town swamped in corruption which famously touted itself as “exclusively industrial.”

True Detective is a horror story about late capitalism. Throughout the second season, characters repeatedly find themselves paying for the same things multiple times. Frank takes out a double mortgage on his house and poker room to invest in a land deal. When his money disappears in the pockets of a dead man mid-purchase, it cuts Frank out of the deal that could help him escape his mob life. Jacob McCandless (Jon Lindstrom) offers him “the same parcel, same price.”

This forces Frank to lean on the people who bought mob businesses from him, to effectively pay him twice for the properties he sold. “How many times do you expect to be paid for the same thing?” Bart Sallis (Chet Grissom) asks about his construction company. When Frank shakes him down for protection money on his motel, Luca Reles (Allel Aimiche) protests, “Frank, you sold the place, you got the cash.” However, there is always more value to be extracted, more money to be made, even when that money is not tied to anything material.

In True Detective, communities are often unravelling and collapsing. Central to the second season is a massive land deal over a high-speed rail corridor, but it’s made very clear that this infrastructure has no benefit to the community. As one reporter (Diane Mizota) observes, “Citizens who rely on public transit are protesting a shortage of bus routes and maintenance in order to subsidize a rail system that does not service their communities.” It’s illusory. It’s industry without humanity.

For all its pulpy genre trappings, there is an apocalyptic air to True Detective. The world is collapsing into itself, with the eponymous detectives investigating forces of entropy and decay that cannot be stopped with a badge and a gun. In the third episode, Ray visits the set of “some collapse of civilization revenge flick”, but he’s also living in one. That film is no more nightmarish than Ray’s later pursuit of a suspect through a homeless encampment, ending with Ray returning to find his car burning on the road.

There is a sense of a reckoning in this. Just as the first season is bookended by reminders of the nation’s original sin, opening with a body posed in a Louisiana sugar cane field and ending with a climactic pursuit through a Civil War fort, the second season’s crimes are ultimately rooted in the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King. “Whatever happened in '92 isn't the issue,” Chief William Holloway (Afemo Omilami) warns Ray. However, Los Angeles is still defined by that trauma.

California occupies an interesting place in the collective consciousness. It is, in a very literal sense, the end of the west. It marks the point at which the American Dream must give way to the unyielding Pacific. That is perhaps why the region lends itself to these sorts of stories. Ani’s estranged father, Elliot Bezzerides (David Morse), is tied up in the region’s New Age spiritual community, confessing that this culture ended up warped and distorted, becoming “a shadow of [his] best intentions.” The region’s material wealth conceals a spiritual emptiness.

There’s a reading of the second season of True Detective, which opens with an episode titled “The Western Book of the Dead”, that sees its characters confronting their traumas and their sins, and with Frank, Ray, and Paul accepting their inevitable deaths while Ani ultimately embraces her life. “One day I’ll admit the story was about four people gradually realizing they’re already dead, and one of them makes it back to life,” confessed Pizzolatto cryptically, suggesting the season’s weird bar “is the Bardo.”

There’s a grimness to the second season of True Detective that surpasses even Cohle’s cynicism in the first season. “My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve,” Ray tells Ani early in the season. However, it’s also possible that this world is inherited. As with Lynch’s work, child abuse is a recurring motif. Frank recalls being locked in a cellar by his abusive father as a child. Ray struggles to relate to his own racist police officer father (Fred Ward). Ani struggles with the memory of abuse at the hands of an adherent of her father’s faith.

Still, there’s a lingering question of what this generation passes on to the next. Ray struggles to relate to his son Chad (Trevor Larcom), who may not be his biological child. Frank and his wife Jordan (Kelly Reilly) are trying to conceive, which is impossible because Jordan has been left infertile because of three previous abortions. Paul’s mother (Lolita Davidovich) tells him that she should have had an abortion. In the end, though, Chad is confirmed to be Ray’s son and Ani conceives another child with Ray.

This is perhaps a deeply personal theme for Pizzolatto. Profiles of the writer tend to vaguely allude to how he “spent much of his childhood grappling with issues that later would surface in True Detective.” However, when pressed on the point, he has clarified that the details are “not something [he is] willing to share.” That is his business and his prerogative, but it provides a strong thematic throughline across his three seasons of True Detective. At their core, these three seasons are ultimately stories of crimes against children in a fallen world.

The second season of True Detective is undeniably a mess. It is certainly a massive step down from the first in terms of quality. There is a credible argument for it as a work of creative hubris. However, it’s also more interesting than many of its critics allow. It’s unflinching in its commitment to its worldview, never hedging its bets. While trading the first season’s novel collision of cosmic horror and police procedural for a more conventional Los Angeles noir, it remains of a piece with what came before while still charting its own course.

All failures should be so compellingly weird, thematically rich, and profoundly personal.