True Detective Season 2 Premiere Review

True Detective Season 2 Premiere Review: This Is My Least Favorite Life

True Detective S02E01: "The Western Book Of The Dead"

A few minutes into the season premiere of True Detective Season 2 (forever known as #TrueDetectiveSeason2 thanks to the sprawling fantasy casting that took place on social media in early 2014), Colin Farrell's Ray Velcoro verbally spars with a lawyer in a conference room. As the camera frames Farrell in a medium close-up shot, his Ray answers questions in an increasingly aggressive and sometimes oddly-phrased fashion, concluding with a line intended to show the character's mix of hubris and self-delusion: "I welcome judgment."

This brief blip was the most informative moment of "The Western Book Of The Dead." It featured a representative of broken masculinity, seated but enthralling, spouting personal histories and half-truths—telling a story, really—before jumping into a flashback that, to a degree, conflicted the man's present day narrative. In visual form and in content, this scene explicitly harkened back to True Detective Season 1. Time is a flat circle. Ray Velcoro is Rust Cohle is Nic Pizzolatto, punctuated with a mission statement via a single line of dialogue.

Excuse the pretension—this is a True Detective review, after all—but I wanted to start here because no show in recent memory returns to the airwaves with more anticipation, with more hype, with more people ready to judge it, than this one. The anthology fabric of True Detective means, in theory, that this is a brand new story, with brand new characters, set on a completely different coast. But that's not how this works. Season 1 of this show took the world by storm just 18 months ago, and many are waiting for something that can match Rust and Marty, the Yellow King and Carcosa, and Cary Fukunaga and The Tracking Shot. Or, they're waiting for it to fail. And while this second season stripped away basically everything I just listed in the previous sentence, leaving only Pizzolatto as the connective tissue between the two stories, this scene also displayed that HBO's new auteur prince wasn't afraid to inspire callbacks to the previous season and was ready for the wave of debate that starts... right now.

The thing is, watching "The Western Book Of The Dead," I couldn't quite grasp if Pizzolatto was writing scenes like this again, with characters who act like this again, because he's trying to address critiques of the show head-on, or if he's doing it simply because this is all he can write. The premiere made overt nods to the franchise history at play here, except when it didn't. Let's just get the comparisons out of the way, then.

Without Fukunaga, Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, and the metaphysically curious flavor, True Detective Season 2's opening episode was a dour enterprise with some potentially good performances that ultimately shared more in common with the rest of television than HBO would probably like us to believe. Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch are not McConaughey and Harrelson, nor do they have the same kind of real-life chemistry as the Season 1 duo. Similarly, Justin Lin made some clear choices to put his own visual imprint on the new story—we've traded the bayou for the superhighways and sprawl of California, and Lin is really into the close-up in a way Fukunaga wasn't—but the revelatory visual flair of Season 1 was at least partially absent here. Finally, while Season 1's first episode almost immediately tossed us into a story with years of (fractured) history and was immediately compelling as a result, this episode took its time to pull together disperse characters in a story that mostly unspooled in the present day. In short: this was not as good as Season 1's opener.

Nonetheless, whatever Pizzolatto's aims or shortcomings, it's important to try to put comparisons to the first season aside—as it was such an exceptional and almost certainly unrepeatable phenomenon—and really consider Season 2 as a wholly new entity. In that vacuum, "The Western Book Of The Dead" tracked a bit better.

I say "a bit" because the combination of the episode's structure and the oppressive bleakness kept me at arm's length for much of the running time. The episode was structured to pull these lost souls together for this important investigation and while it certainly accomplished that, it was a slog getting there. Farrell's Ray shared an important history with Vaughn's Frank, one of the big power players in the small town of Vinci, California, but otherwise, the central characters were scattered across California in their own stories. That's not necessarily a bad approach, but each character's introduction felt too similar to one another to have lasting impact. Ray was an angry, corrupt detective haunted by a past trauma (his now ex-wife was raped nine months before giving birth). McAdams' Ani Bezzerides was an angry member of the Ventura Sheriff's Department haunted by past traumas (her unconventional upbringing in a hippie commune of sorts). And Kitsch's Paul Woodrugh is a highway patrolman—you guessed it—haunted by past trauma (namely his time as a contractor in the Middle East).

Still, Farrell, McAdams, and Kitsch were all pretty solid, all things considered. Farrell was given the biggest moments early on and he's clearly our entry point into this dirty and ugly world. He's primed to shine in this role. With the hair, the mustache, the gum chewing, the brass knucks, the evocative cursing at elementary school kids—it's all there. McAdams is my favorite actor of all the leads and we can't ignore that it's simply nice to see Pizzolatto slide a "strong" female character into the spotlight. I liked the way McAdams carried herself as Ani; She moved in a methodical way that suggested real purpose. Yet, as Tim mentioned on the podcast this week, Ani was such a stereotypical Strong Female Character that she was more or less just like the gruff and tough bros on the show. That's less than ideal, but let's hope McAdams will continue to breathe some life into what might be a lame archetype. As for Kitsch, well, he looked great with his shirt off. That's not a knock on his work here but more of a comment on how little this episode gave him to do. The key difference between Paul and the other two characters was his lack of dialogue, and that's a good choice by Pizzolatto, Lin, and Kitsch. He's not the kind of actor that needs long monologues to make an impact—but he does need stuff to do.

That of course leaves Vaughn, who will likely be the most discussed actor throughout these eight episodes. He's the one making the transition back to drama and Frank was positioned as a kind of antagonist. Working in Vaughn's advantage was that Frank felt like a different kind of character for Pizzolatto—he's a bad guy trying to go straight as opposed to the other way around—so there won't be immediate comparisons to everyone else on the show. There were certainly moments where Vaughn appeared to be really trying hard to be a serious actor, but he wasn't out of place. His performance of Frank's insecurities about the big deal or his potential fatherhood hit the best. Of course, working to Vaughn's advantage was that he was saddled with some clumsy dialogue, so lines like, "Don't ever do anything out of hunger—not even eating," probably weren't going to land no matter who said them.

Thematically, the similarities between Season 1 and this episode were hard to set aside, again if only because Pizzolatto's key interests haven't changed much. The world doesn't need another exploration of broken masculinity, whether through male characters struggling with their own identities or female characters who have been shaped by the various men in their lives.

However, the most successful elements here were in the fringes of the story. The metaphysical flourishes might be gone, but the addition of city politics and corruption provided a solid backdrop to the inciting murder case. Though the torture and murder of a city manager didn't necessarily sound exciting, it offered the show the chance to case a murder "all the way to the top" like the pulpy novels from which it took its name. Whether or not the show can pull off any kind of valuable commentary or criticism on local government, urban planning, and labor conditions is beyond me. But you know what? I could be interested in Pizzolatto trying to do his best David Simon impression.

To that point, while I mentioned that Lin's visual style didn't match Fukunaga's work from the last go-around, his emphasis on shots of the superhighways, industrial parks, and urban sprawl helped snap the storylines into place. Those shots helped establish place and underscored that these characters might be initially disparate but were ultimately connected by these highways. Furthermore, when you take these shots together with the sullen nature of the characters, you start to see a clearer picture of True Detective Season 2. Whereas Season 1 was more philosophical and almost dreamlike in the way it captured the bayou, this story is, at least at the start, direct and grim, and full of people damaged by time, just like Vinci.

But in case you were looking for some of the style of Season 1, how about those final few shots, huh? To move from a heroic pan to the trio of detectives who were going to take on the Ben Caspar murder case to the epic helicopter shot above the crime scene showing the coast and the ocean off the PCH at dawn was probably enough to grab Justin Lin some awards attention come next year. It wasn't an epic tracking shot, but it was a darn good start.

I know I said I'd stop trying to compare the two seasons, but man, that's hard to do. At times in this premiere, it felt like Pizzolatto asked us to make those comparisons, while at other times, he appeared to respond to previous criticism. That's a lot to take in as a viewer before we even get to the details of the story, characterization, etc. What I do know are two things: First, one episode won't tell us much about how different Season 2 is from Season 1. Second, despite the early similarities and the absence of some of the things that made Season 1 special, there was still enough here to keep me interested. The judgment Ray and the show are readying themselves for will come, but I'm very curious to see more of this show. Are you?

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