Judging by the campaign of scales and chirping sticks in the mouth that they have inflicted on True Detective, it seems that there are a lot of men who are stung by the batches of wood, by wood aunts, that is, by temperamental, shady, tough policewomen as a concentration camp capo and stripped of all qualities of complacent and flirtatious femininity. I want to believe that the sting only affects a minority – loud but irrelevant – and that these new detectives draw more applause than boos. And it doesn't surprise me.
Jodie Foster reigns supreme on True Detective. The series has only just begun and things can still go wrong, so any judgment is tentative, but I love this story of polar and nighttime horror with echoes of Stephen King, where Foster gives out slaps and shows off everyone.
Although my favorite is British and called Cush Jumbo. Not only is she a woman, she's black and has very short hair, all the qualities hated by those who want to make America – and cop shows – great again. We saw her in “The Good Fight”, where she played the wonderful lawyer Lucca Quinn, and now she is the protagonist of “Criminal History”, one of those great dramas that only the cradle of the genre, the United Kingdom, can make white. There are neo-Nazis, imprisoned innocents and very corrupt police officers here. Jumbo's character doesn't have time to go to the hairdresser or talk to anyone. Not even to deal with his son's teenage years.
Stubborn police officers with twisted empathy and the drive of a barely tamed angry cop are now part of the usual police drama. Thanks to them, the genre does not sink into its own clichés and we can see the stories we already know as if they were new.
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