True Detective Has Returned, But No One Really Invited It
I've spent the 2010s watching so many detective mysteries involving horrific murder tableaus that, were I ever to see one for myself in real life, I'd probably be bored. True Detective isn't the only show responsible for this, but it's definitely the one that got me actively wondering.
Naturally my sentiment is untrue, but in True Detective's efforts to one-up itself (and similar efforts by the slew of shows it inspired), it's found itself in the strange predicament of somehow trying to make murder worse. This was true of its first two seasons, which managed to be notable for allusions to weird fiction/tremendous direction (in season one) and astoundingly dull philosophical pablum (in both seasons). And so in its third season, four years after its last, we return, and it all seems rote. Once again, there's a body. This time it's a little boy, hands held in prayer, surrounded by intricate paper dolls. Once again, a man recoils in horror, utterly broken by the grotesque display. Once again, we see his future, the lengths at which he would go to solve this mystery, fail, and become a broken shell of a man.
Across three seasons of True Detective, creator/writer Nic Pizzolatto seems most interested in using a single crime as an impetus for diving deep into the barely-hidden fissures that lie at the heart of what holds people together. Crime weighs on the souls of the men who investigate them, revealing them to be frustrated, self-involved souls who flail when their moral understanding of the world is challenged, destabilizing their marriages, justifying infidelity, and provoking indignant rage. Churches aren't community pillars but places for evil to hide in plain sight. Highways, open fields, and other pastoral landscapes are no longer images that give us peace, but harbingers of doom and portent.
Of course, this is the same thing that Law & Order or any other cop show worth its salt does. Which is to say that True Detective is just Law & Order, but slower and more expensive. It's like Red Dead Redemption 2 in that way, asking you to marvel at its finely tuned aesthetic sensibilities and the exceptional talent it's assembled while hoping you don't stop to notice that it's all in the service of rote self-indulgence.
This is the lesson that is learned every time True Detective tries its hand at the one thing that can ostensibly elevate it above the standard procedural: depth. More than once in the five episodes sent to critics in advance, True Detective attempts and fails miserably to use its central crime as a lens by which we can examine race, class, gender, and the ways they all collide in the parts of America frequently fretted over in New York Times op-eds. White men talk about the N-word, a documentarian name-checks intersectionality, and two women talk about how racial politics sometimes erase the significance of class divides, but there's a tone deafness to it all, a sense of incompletion that's mirrored with a scene in which two characters in a marital dispute cannot reach a sense of mutual understanding, so they have sex instead.
There's a version of True Detective that's a trenchant and horrific examination of our narrow ideas of masculinity, and how it impedes the work of justice. Across three timelines, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) is ensnared and obsessed and, eventually, a husk, because evil challenged him and found him wanting. But even this seems like a shortsighted goal, because while True Detective labors to expand its scope beyond Hays, the endgame it gestures at is not necessarily criticism, but absolution. The show, like the men whose lives it chronicles, lacks wherewithal.
The dead kids only matter as much as they allow men to bear the tremendous burden of being men in the face of great adversity, grappling with evil on behalf of others and wrestling with darkness they cannot possibly understand. It's a vision of arrogance and condescension, but it's also in the grand tradition of cop shows. True Detective bills itself as something better, but really, it's just more of the same.
