True Detective’s biggest mystery: why did it get so bad?
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The latest series of True Detective has everything you would want of a creepy New Year mystery. There is the remote and atmospheric setting of Ennis, Alaska – a deep-freeze purgatory which, if not quite at the end of the world, is surely only a few stops away. As with previous seasons, True Detective: Night Country features a starry cast, including Jodie Foster and Christopher Eccleston as cops trying to hold on to their sanity while the Arctic midwinter banishes sunlight and all positive vibes.
There are nods towards the supernatural with a return of the spiralling motifs that sent the internet wild when the original True Detective arrived a decade ago, putting the afterburners beneath the Matthew McConaughey “McConaissance.”
One thing is missing, however – any meaningful contribution from True Detective creator and, until now, its guiding light, Nic Pizzolatto. The one-time wunderkind of spooky noir is taking a back seat and listed merely as executive producer: Hollywood’s way of thanking him for his previous contributions to the franchise. Otherwise, Night Country, arriving on Sky Atlantic on January 15, is a land untouched by Old Nic. Responsibility has instead passed to experienced Mexican writer/director, Issa López.
Hollywood writers are famously thin-skinned. Many would be miffed at seeing their lives’ work continue without them. Not Pizzolatto. He’s otherwise occupied on many fronts. He is working on a horror movie for Blumhouse, the studio behind recent Halloween and Exorcist spin-offs and collaborating with Vince Vaughn on a project about a Las Vegas lounge singer. There is also the small matter of his script for Marvel’s reboot of its vampire anti-hero Blade.
In general, Pizzolatto is all tied up not being The True Detective Guy. He isn’t complaining. If anything, he’s probably thrilled. The success of True Detective in 2014 caught everyone off guard – particularly its raw young writer, who had just arrived in Hollywood and was determined to make his mark. The problem was that he did not want to make the kind of mark that True Detective would figuratively tattoo across his forehead.
His dissatisfaction stemmed from the distance between his vision for True Detective and how the public received it. Pizzolatto was a published novelist and deep thinker who saw True Detective as a deconstruction of modern masculinity. Stars McConaughey and Woody Harrelson bought into that vision with their performances as Rust Cohle and Marty Hart – hardbitten Louisiana cops investigating a streak of cult murders. But for Pizzolatto, the murders were mere window-dressing: the real mystery concerned the lead characters’ inner struggles. It wasn’t a whodunnit, more a “what’s-it-all-about-dunnit”.
For Cohle, that vulnerability had to do with the death of his daughter. In Marty’s case, it centred on his serial unfaithfulness and the husk his marriage had become. Yet to Pizzolatto’s apparent distress, viewers were more interested in the cult murders and the Lovecraftian supernatural horror. The latter were provided via references to Robert Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a novel from 1895 about a play that triggers insanity in its audience (a sort of 19th-century Saltburn).
Even as the series was airing, it became clear Pizzolatto and punters were at cross-purposes. He had made one kind of programme. Viewers were watching another entirely. “I’m not interested in creating disgusting monsters or the most bizarre serial killer ever,” the disdainful writer told TV Guide. “My primary concern is always the humanism of the characters. Where the show gains its power… I think, is in things that aren’t investigative at all. It’s in two men talking to one another in a car… Those are the things that always interest me.”
True Detective series one continued to hint at the esoteric to the end. The finale included a sequence in which Cohle hallucinated a cosmic void straight out to Lovecraft. Nonetheless, Pizzolatto has spent the past 10 years trying to convince the world that he isn’t that person. The one who hit upon the ingenious idea of merging the pulp fiction with the supernatural. That’s okay. HBO has hired López to do so instead, and she delivers impressively with Night Country. Magnificently gloomy, it riffs on John Carpenter’s Antarctic horror mainstay The Thing and on Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (a major influence on Carpenter).
Pizzolatto has been scaling his own snow-capped peaks in a quest to find his true voice. He recently posted a snap of a table-read with Tom Cruise from 2012 on Instagram. “While it did not lead to us becoming best friends and travelling companions, as I’d hoped, it remains a career highlight,” he wrote.
The read was for a reboot of classic western The Magnificent Seven, from which Cruise would depart so that he could make the same Mission Impossible movie over and over. Pizzolatto, though, stayed in the saddle and, with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, shepherded the project to the screen in 2016.
But despite an all-star cast including Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke, it failed to set multiplexes ablaze. For all its potential, The Magnificent Seven turned out to be merely an adequate second chapter in Pizzolatto’s career.
Of course, by 2016, he knew what failure felt like. He was still coming to terms with the disastrous second season of True Detective – a calamity so vast and all-consuming that it was widely seen as retroactively ruining the original McConaughey-Harrelson two-hander.
There were many issues with True Detective series two. Audiences were disappointed by the absence of references to the supernatural. Vince Vaughn was miscast as a brooding gangster. The plot was a mess. Pizzolatto was flying solo after a rumoured falling-out with director Cary Fukunaga, whose improvisational and haunting style had elevated series one.
Twelve months on from that unexpected triumph, it was just Pizzolatto. HBO, the prestige network behind TD, had lofty expectations. Chippy newcomer Netflix was breathing down its neck. HBO programming president Michael Lombardo was counting on Pizzolatto to deliver. He pushed too hard. Pizzolatto cracked.
“Our biggest failures – and I don’t know if I would consider True Detective 2 – but when we tell somebody to hit an air date as opposed to allowing the writing to find its own natural resting place, when it’s ready, when it’s baked — we’ve failed,” Lombardo would reflect.
“Nic Pizzolatto… is a soulful writer,” he continued. “I think what we did was go, ‘Great.’ And I take the blame. I became too much of a network executive at that point. We had huge success. ‘Gee, I’d love to repeat that next year…’ Well, you know what? I set him up.”
By then, True Detective season two had become prestige TV’s ultimate cautionary tale. Shifting the setting from Louisiana to suburban Los Angeles, it took all of the original run’s worst qualities and amplified them. There was a convoluted storyline about stolen diamonds, inter-generational revenge and – squeezed in somehow – high-class orgies. It was beyond saving, even with great performances by Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell.
Having embraced the persona of lone-wolf auteur, Pizzolatto discovered it’s a long way down when you’re on the edge on your own. He’d grown up poor in the same southern Louisiana hinterland he would later bring so eerily to life telling the story of Hart and Cohle. After working a series of minimum wage jobs and graduating from a creative writing course at the University of Arkansas, his breakthrough was via the current affairs magazine The Atlantic, where he published several short stories.
A debut novel, Galveston, followed in 2010. At that point, he became a person of interest to the TV industry (an adaptation of Galveston starring Elle Fanning and Ben Foster was released in 2018).
He’d always been drawn to television. Yet, as a poor kid from the sticks, breaking into the entertainment industry had struck him as fanciful. It was only when one of his spec scripts fell into the lap of McConaughey – then looking to move away from rom-coms – that True Detective became a reality.
“It’s ludicrous,” was Pizzolatto’s take on his chances of ever writing for television. “You might as well say you want to be a movie star. [G]rowing up in south Louisiana, going to state school for college, and working two jobs… I spent four years bartending in Austin. I never had any money or any window into the world of TV.”
At the end of season two, True Detective was perceived as having crashed and burned. Consequently, plans for a third were put on hold. That series eventually saw daylight in 2019, with Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali playing a cop investigating a crime in Northwest Arkansas in the Eighties (the action hopscotching between past and present).
This time, it was going to be different. Before giving the green light, HBO insisted that Pizzolatto be more open to collaboration. He was specifically requested to share the script-writing burden with outside writers (two co-writers receive credits alongside Pizzolatto – Deadwood creator David Milch and Graham Gordy).
Yet rumours of Pizzolatto’s cuddly side were exaggerated. Going into True Detective 3, it was announced that Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room, Hold the Dark) would direct the first three episodes. Pleading “scheduling conflicts,” he departed after overseeing just two. The gossip was that Pizzolatto remained a forceful creator who liked to keep his hands on the tiller.
Not everyone has been ready to condemn him – or True Detective year two. Some have argued that Pizzolatto was judged unfairly against what he’d achieved working with McConaughey and Harrelson. John Crowley, who directed the finale before finding success with the period romance Brooklyn, felt that the strengths of the TD2 would take a while to become clear.
“I got a lot of good and bad reactions,” he told me when I derailed an interview promoting Brooklyn to quiz him about True Detective in 2015. “I tried to keep my head down. I don’t take it personally. Going in, I knew it was going to be a rocky road because the first series had been such a phenomenon. When they announced the second series, the blogs went crazy.
“So I knew it wasn’t going to get a fair shake, that it might be a wobbly journey. The thing is, you don’t make work to be critically praised – you make it because it is interesting. The series found its feet as it went on – became richer, deeper. You had to invest in the journey. A certain section of people weren’t willing to do that.”
True Detective: Night Country is a creepy midwinter gift to fans of the first season. Show-runner López has returned to the saga’s horror roots with a thriller she describes as a “negative image” of that first True Detective. “Where True Detective is male, and it’s sweaty, Night Country is cold, and it’s dark, and it’s female,” she told Vanity Fair.
For Pizzolatto, life has moved on. He has swapped LA for Austin, Texas, divorced and remarried (country singer Suzanne Santo). He’s been busy writing too. One project he’s trying to get off the ground is Easy’s Waltz – “an original film I plan to direct that will star Vince Vaughn as a singer in Las Vegas”. Pizzolatto has, in addition, completed the script to Grass Rifles – an “original western TV series” for Amazon that, it is understood, will be in the same rugged vein as Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone.
And he’s written The Frenchman, a Euro-thriller based on the novel by Jack Beaumont. However, he has cautioned fans not to get ahead of themselves.
“All these projects require millions of dollars, and the market being what it is, I can’t guarantee you’ll actually get to watch all (or any) of them, but the wheels are in motion,” he wrote on Instagram. “All of which is just to assure the fans on here that I haven’t retired and am creating robustly just not super-dark stories about murder and retribution.”
In his social media posts, Pizzolatto comes across as wry, self-aware, and, if not quite easy-going, then certainly not a writer haunted by demons. At 48, he may have learned to relax. He has even abandoned his previous aversion to the supernatural and is writing a screenplay for indie studio Blumhouse, best known for its many reboots of the Halloween franchise.
Along with all that, he is working with TD3 star Mahershala Ali on a Blade movie for Marvel. That film will tell the tale of a half-vampire living among men – a gloomy spirit who has learned to co-exist with humans and to endure the daylight. Pizzolatto will know precisely how Blade feels. Ten years after True Detective, the story Pizzolatto is about to tell for Marvel is also his own.
