After one major career-minting success (“True Detective” season one) and one resounding follow-up failure (season two), the narrative around “True Detective” creator /showrunner/writer/ Nic Pizzolatto’s third season is that he is returning to a back-to-basics approach. But that’s hardly the case, and perhaps more accurately, season three marks a quasi-return to safety, albeit one that’s needlessly more complicated and predictably dour.
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Set in three time periods, the 1980s, the 1990s and 2015, Pizzolatto makes it extra difficult on himself and the viewer in season three, featuring a crime at its center that spans four decades. And by following the pattern of season one—aging, washed-out characters revisiting their cases years later—Pizzolatto, who also takes a turn in the director’s chair for this edition, helming two of the eight episodes, delivers a familiar formula for season three. But it’s also ambitious in scope–a story about wrestling with the past, personal redemption and memory, the reflections of who we are versus who we once were and everything that broke in between. Time isn’t necessarily a flat circle; it’s the ever-present equalizer that will always win in the end, whether you remember or not.
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“Yeah, of course, I remember,” is the first line of the series, uttered by Arkansas state police detective Wayne Hays (a typically excellent Mahershala Ali) setting up a story of reexamination both literal and figurative. But does he? The fragmented version of the retired Hays, elderly and seemingly facing dementia or senility, isn’t so sure these words ring so true 15 years later.
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It’s the Ozarks in the 1990s, and state prosecutors are looking to reopen a ghoulish case about missing children that Hays initially investigated in the 1980s with his partner Roland West (a somewhat miscast Stephen Dorff, especially when you’ve got Scoot McNairy, who feels like the better fit, acting alongside him). “10 years is nothing, I remember everything,” Hays says, trying to decode the motives of his superiors, but then the show, as it is wont to do, jumps back into the 1980s where Hays and West originally caught the case.
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Set to a simmer, the mystery deepens over decades, as “True Detective” ping-pongs around in time, drawing connections, flying red herrings and deliberately, unhurriedly putting pieces of the puzzle together. In 1980, the victims were the children of an estranged marriage—Tom and Lucy Purcell (McNairy and Mamie Gummer)—who’ve gone missing one evening during what should be a routine visit to a friend’s house. This slow-burn drama embroils an entire community into paranoia, hostility, and mistrust with many an angry white man looking to blame the first misfit among the demographic of what should be the sleepy suburb of West Finger, Arkansas.
Also entangled in this story is the concerned schoolteacher Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo). She goes from Hays’ object of affection to his wife to writer and investigative journalist who, over the years, ends up writing a book about what becomes known as the Purcell case and in the process becomes a renowned expert on the subject, overshadowing her husband much to his chagrin.
But at the heart of “True Detective” and its crime is the senior version of Hays, who is haunted by the twists and turns of this unsolved case. Cleverly leveraging our cultural obsession with true-crime documentaries and podcasts (“Serial” et al.), the 2015 version of Hays, old and fading, is asked to look back on the case yet again by a true crime TV documentary producer (Sarah Gadon). On the sidelines, his apprehensive son (Ray Fisher), looks on, concerned that all the re-probing will mentally exhaust and existentially harm his already aged and spiritually wounded father.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btoZfxs0pE0
Written primarily by Pizzolatto, with a little bit of help from the great David Milch (“Deadwood”) and Graham Gordy, again, it’s a recognizable mode, and featuring many of the same macho, tough guy mannerisms of Pizzolatto’s crime procedurals. Cops drink, chew on their cigarettes, treat their women like trophies that soon become appendages, and shoot the shit with typical chauvinist, sexist and racist dialogue (though ‘TD’ tries to bend over backward, straining itself, to prove that its best white characters aren’t really bigoted).
All this in mind, “True Detective” is a mix of the unsatisfyingly familiar and the intriguing (the mystery of where this thing is going does hook you), powered by powerful performances, especially that of Ali.
But the moody tough-guyness of it all does get heavy-handed and tiresome. Even its opening credits—a portentous, bad moon rising song (“Death Letter” by Cassandra Wilson) signals what you’re going to get: another story of weary men, wicked people, and the warning of death and suffering on the horizon. Much like season one, “True Detective” hints at both a conspiracy and the macabre; something unholy might be behind everything, though it’s still too early to tell (critics were given six of eight episodes). Like season one, Pizzolatto looks as though he is saving his big reveals for his final two episodes.
One can’t help but compare the third season to its two predecessors, the inaugural series which became a Peak TV phenomenon and the unfairly maligned second season which bucked the time jumping formula and paid the price for it, despite the excellent cast and overlooked story about fatherhood and falling short as a parent.
It’s mostly unfair to judge, but if you must, Ali and his weaker half, Dorff, simply don’t match up to Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey nor does the direction or visual style. Jeremy Saulnier, booted from the series from after bumping heads with the notoriously controlling Pizzolatto, naturally helms the best two episodes, and Daniel Sackheim of “The Americans” films in the back half of the series.
Ultimately, “True Detective” earns the most mileage not out of the crime or mystery itself, though it is mostly absorbing, but as the story of Hays and his ghosts. Season three feels like a tribute to a father figure you’ve watched recede before your eyes. It’s a story about a life’s work and potentially one dedicated to a folly or failure that you might take to the grave (while we’re at it, the less said about the elderly Dorff’s “J. Edgar”-like withered make-up, the better). Ali is not only terrific, his character’s uncharitable reevaluation of his legacy as a detective and his frustrations with his losing limitations as an old man, engender empathy and tie the story together in a way that removes us from the paradigm of talky, manly hardheads.
That said, a moody, grim sameness suffuses it all with that thick air of self-importance and strained solemnity that drags. “True Detective” season three, for all its various highlights, wants to be seen as a capital S serious story, as told by serious people, but it’s perhaps a little too concerned with whether or not it’ll sear into your memory. [C+]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZP6t1FmVO8
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