The New True Detective Overhauls Everything the Series Was Known For

Nothing makes 2014 feel further away than recalling that, back then, the first season of HBO’s True Detective was hailed as a work of genius. Sumptuously photographed and directed, and grounded by two magnetic performances by straight-up movie stars, that season, arriving smack-dab in the midst of the golden age of premium cable, certainly bolstered TV’s claim as the prestige medium of the day. But a revisit in the present day only highlights that first season’s weak spots.

There’s the muddled ending. There are the portentous red-herring cultural allusions engineered seemingly to fuel podcasts and columns promising to decode their secret meanings and to drive further publicity for the show. There is the dorm-room edgelord nihilism of Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle—which I’ll confess I mistook for parody the first time around, causing me to find the early episodes much funnier than they were in fact meant to be. And there’s the underlying conspiracy plot about a pagan cult of pedophiles composed of the rich and powerful, with its unsettling resemblance to what we can now identify as the paranoid fantasia of QAnon. While that first season of True Detective was a handsomely mounted, splendidly acted piece of crime fiction, if it were released today, amid an abundance of top-quality detective shows, would it still be so celebrated?

This is why a fourth season of True Detective, appearing a decade after its sweaty, broody, macho debut, calls not for a return to form but for an overhaul—which is exactly what the stylish and eerie True Detective: Night Country, premiering on HBO on Sunday, succeeds at being. The series has a new showrunner, Issa López, a Mexican director best known for the lyrically frightful 2017 horror film Vuelven (released in the U.S. as Tigers Are Not Afraid), about street children battling the drug cartel that killed their parents. López has conceived of Night Country as a response to the series’ first season, a mirror image that reverses the thing it reflects while offering a fresh path forward. Instead of humid rural Louisiana, the setting is frigid, small-town northwestern Alaska during the time of year when the sun never rises above the horizon. Instead of men, the two estranged detectives reunited to clear up the cold case that drove them apart are women. The victims of the new crime that brings them together aren’t abused children or girls, but adult men—a team of research scientists found naked and frozen in tormented postures out on the ice.

Jodie Foster plays Elizabeth Danvers, the police chief of the fictional Ennis, Alaska. (Is she named after the sinister housekeeper in Rebecca for a reason? If so, that reason is as obscure as the first season’s references to Robert Chambers’ 1895 short story collection The King in Yellow.) When the case of the dead scientists turns up a link to an unsolved murder that Danvers once worked on with Evangeline Navarro (a charismatic Kali Reis), who quit the police to become a state trooper, the two women must team up again. Like the philandering Marty Hart, played by Woody Harrelson in Season 1, Danvers, a widow, has a messy and very active sex life. Navarro—along with the Indigenous people who live in what Ennis’ white residents refer to as “the villages”—is of Iñupiaq descent but alienated from those roots. And like Rust Cohle, she has a dark metaphysical side, believing that she and her family are cursed.

Nic Pizzolatto, the original creator and would-be auteur of True Detective, had an affinity for noir that emerged fully in the series’ second and third seasons, with their baroque municipal corruption plots and wisecracking dialogue. The creepy twig dolls and animal masks in Pizzolatto’s seasons of True Detective hinted at supernatural forces that never actually materialized. In Night Country, by contrast, López pledges her allegiance to horror with lashings of jump scares and gruesome apparitions. The first episode features a memorable scene of Fiona Shaw (playing a reclusive former professor) gutting a dead wolf in the snow when she is interrupted by the ghost of her late lover, who has useful information to impart. Such strange doings, apparently, aren’t uncommon. “This is Ennis,” a delivery truck driver explains to a police officer. “You see people sometimes. It’s a long fucking night. Even the dead get bored.”

Nevertheless, something has gone badly wrong with Ennis, as suggested in the first episode’s opening scene—in which an Iñupiaq hunter witnesses a herd of caribou charging, lemminglike, over the edge of a cliff. The cold case that haunts Navarro is the murder of Annie K, an Iñupiaq activist protesting the environmental devastation caused by a local mining concern. The spiral tattoo on Annie’s corpse—a carry-over from Season 1—matches a symbol drawn on the forehead of one of the dead scientists, but the clue that clinches the connection between the two cases is a human tongue found on the floor of the deserted research station. But what does it all mean? “I think the world is getting old,” Shaw’s character explains to Navarro, “and Ennis is the place where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.”

The best detective fiction depicts the violation, then the healing, however imperfect, of a social order. In the process it offers a portrait of that order and the truths it must be compelled to yield up and confront. The detective has a license to step into rooms the reader could never access herself and to ask questions otherwise forbidden. López understands this, and a particular strength of Night Country is Ennis itself. The town feels fully manifested. We see Danvers and Navarro dealing with the everyday concerns of policing: unruly drunks and domestic abusers. Each woman comes to us enmeshed in a network of long-standing relationships, parental and quasi-parental, erotic and platonic, inflected by race and gender and class. “Who are you?” the Iñupiaq characters keep asking Navarro, meaning: Where do you fit in the web of humanity that is this community? The towns and cities in Pizzolatto’s True Detective, by comparison, are thin and lifeless, mere backdrops to two men driving around in a car.

In Pizzolatto’s seasons, the truth was usually found on the outskirts, in sugar cane fields, jungly woods, and derelict structures overcome by the rampant fecundity of nature and haunted by degenerate rednecks. Like the rituals of that shadowy pedophile cult, these spaces represented some kind of reversion, a backward movement of civilization or of the heroes themselves. Pizzolatto likes to send his detectives down into tunnels and caves, passages dripping with moisture and tangled with overgrowth, whose sexual imagery hardly needs to be pointed out.

López works into her story some tunnels as well, but of a very different kind. The cosmic horror implicit in Pizzolatto’s True Detective becomes explicit in López’s. Some great force is stirring. “She’s awake,” a convulsing scientist says in a video found on a cellphone abandoned in the research station, a phrase repeated in the dreams and auditory hallucinations of other characters. The spiral symbol that, according to a character in Pizzolatto’s True Detective, stands for “large-scale pedophile rings connected to people of influence” has a more ambiguous meaning here.

As a plot device, the elite satanic pedophile rings in Pizzolatto’s True Detective always felt a bit lazy, a semaphore for absolute evil, titillating and sensational enough to outrage even the least sophisticated viewer, which is surely also why Q, from the fetid depths of the internet, later resorted to the same motif in his conspiracy yarns. Even if pedophiles are overrepresented in the population of “people of influence” (which I doubt), it’s not as if the rich and powerful need to be malevolent, devil-worshipping perverts to do tremendous harm to the rest of us, including untold numbers of children. They just have to be greedy and indifferent. This is a story López has told before, powerfully, and while it may be less salacious than Pizzolatto’s True Detective, it has the advantage of being true.