The appearance of True Detective (HBO) in 2014 with the rescue of two classic actors who were easily forgotten – or relegated to romantic comedy, or a cinema that no longer challenged them – like Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson stunning character construction, detectives with more nuance and chiaroscuro than ever before and a break with the classic noir schema – the play with the timeline that leaves the viewer confused – not to mention the fantastic or mystical component it represented Before and after. A later way of conceiving crime dramas on television. Without going into detail about how it made its mark on toxic masculinity, the series sublimated the possibilities of the genre, turning each season into a multifaceted story in which the sordid shook hands with the everyday and, at the same time, the past and the present the community – the space, the very important setting – in which the crime took place or took place in this, sometimes ghostly or foggy other time.
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Its author, Nic Pizzolatto, who was first a writer – and university professor of creative writing – before becoming showrunner, somehow ended up caught up in the phenomenon. As if the edifice built in that first season had exhausted its well of narrative wisdom — a well brilliantly directed by Cary Fukunaga (“No Time to Die”) — it seemed like no other season there was one that could keep up. Although the elements that were supposed to give it continuity – such as the importance of the setting, which was California in the second, and the inhospitality of the urban area and the Ozarks in the third – were still there, the attempt to re-energize it had failed. The formula, because the recipe of the first season should not and could not be recharged by turning in a different direction, but, as Noah Hawley did very well with Fargo, by dealing with it. And while the one starring Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn – the second – tries and almost succeeds, the third goes so far off the mark that it's completely unrecognizable.
The fact that there is a year between the first and second seasons (which premiered in 2015) and four years between the second and third (which premiered in 2019) gives some idea of what was going on inside. That said, something wasn't working and perhaps it wasn't worth continuing to try to exploit the format. That the fourth season is coming out now, five years later, and doesn't have Pizzolatto at the helm – who admitted at the end of the third that he had a “very good” idea for the fourth, an idea that was scrapped – is also why it has to do with the feeling of doom that the series brought with it after such an underwhelming beginning. The problem is not that Pizzolatto and Fukunaga were so on the right track to begin with that things were insurmountable. The problem is that the decisions made afterward were not ambitious enough. Is it the decision of Issa López, the new showrunner of True Detective, to create a reversal of the first? Yes, as long as it is seen as a new but cold beginning.
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, stars of “True Detective.” “Polar Night” at the series premiere in Los Angeles.Sipa USA (Sthanlee Mirador/Sipa USA / Cordon Press)
For López, a Mexican author and filmmaker who counts Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro among her fans, who loved her film “Vuelven,” the ideal was to go back to the starting point and turn the whole thing around. Where there was excessive masculinity, insert strong women – two detectives, Liz Danvers (one, here the lovely Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) – and swap dusty, hot Louisiana for frozen Alaska and cosmic horror . and Victorian, Lovecraftian, by Robert W. Chambers – author of The Yellow King, one of the references of the first season – for a science fiction that is not afraid of the supernatural and that, without complexes, recalls The thing by John Carpenter, almost the first picture. The result is undoubtedly something new and should be judged as such, since an attempt has been made to find some similarity with the first part, a line of continuity that does not pass through the heading – which for the first time has added a title, Polar Night -, it is impossible.
So right from the start, this new True Detective is much more reminiscent of a serious episode of The Yes, López naming Ridley Scott's Nostromo and the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining as key references, in addition to The Thing and True Detective. And that doesn't matter at all, because in its own way it opens up an arctic noir in which, yes, there are two timelines again – an activist died six years ago, and her language is the only thing that suddenly appears in the film is uninhabited base – and two types of agents at the top – Agent Navarro, very tough, with her spectacular cheek piercings and her tattoos and her Napoleonic and lonely attitude, is a state agent, and she stands above Danvers, the worried mother of a slightly headstrong one , weak and cerebral teenager – and a complex crime that seems impossible to solve.
The setting is ten – in fact, it is the main value of the season: the viewer must be prepared to be cold in front of the screen, in the lost Ennis, the fate of Twin Peaks at the end of the world – and the way in which the strange – there are ghosts, yes, and they communicate with the neighbors in some way – the plot takes over, is frankly risqué given where it comes from. That means López is making his mark, and that's always a good thing. The series is more willing than ever to denounce social differences and also pays attention to diversity. The fact that the victims are not just men and have nothing to do with the hackneyed underworld – they are scientists and activists, not prostitutes or prostitutes – also speaks to one or more reasons for the new True Detective, which is also has a disadvantage This comes from excessive concern with the plot: the cold – this time narrative – that prevents the characters from living, the driving force of all self-respecting crime novels.
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