True Detective: Night Country (2024) review

It is safe to say that True Detective is one of my favorite shows of all time, the 1st in particular being one of my favorite stories ever told. Despite the drop in quality from season to season, I think there is a lot of value to be found in the show overall, even in the two seasons that are much weaker than the 1st. The 2nd season in particular has an alluring quality to me, its shortcomings adding more character to it and making it more memorable to me than I think it may have had if it was actually good. To me, the confusing, bloated and overly ambitious plot combined with muddled themes and an insanely messy and borderline incomprehensible storytelling with way too many characters and way too many cooks in the kitchen behind the scenes is as much of a lightning-in-a-bottle situation as Season 1 was on the opposite end of the spectrum. “Just be better than Season 2” is the bar that has been set for True Detective ever since it came out in 2015.

HBO has been trying to recreate that miraculously high level of quality that Season 1 of True Detective had as desperately as fans want to see another season half as good, going as far as to effectively remake the first season in 2019 with the show's 3rd season. With the newest season, titled “True Detective: Night Country,” HBO’s goal seems to be at odds with itself in re-invigorating the True Detective brand. On one hand, the show wants to do its own thing and separate itself from the previous seasons, both from a surface level standpoint and at the creative core. The most noticeable stylistic differences can be seen in the title itself, it's the first with a subtitle, and the opening credit scene, which instead of being right at the beginning of the episode, follows an opening scene. Visually, these sequences are different too, changing every episode, with some vague, boring visuals and clues that will be seen in the upcoming episode set to the Billie Eilish song “Bury a Friend." The new intro was the first piece of the puzzle that told me that this new season was going to be fucking terrible and thoughtless. It’s a small thing, but in the first three seasons, the visuals of the opening credits as well as the song that accompanied them, was extremely important not only to set the tone but also to establish themes and environment. The landscape of the season with outlines of the characters cut into them and voids ingrained into the characters instead of facial features is a simple but striking image, evoking a feeling of symbiosis between the landscapes and the characters. Not only are characters a product of their environment, the environment is a product of the characters. The songs are chosen to sell the regional environment of the season, the first in the swampy bayous of Louisiana, the second in a seedy, West Coast urban environment, and the third in a spread out, lonely Midwestern town.

With Night Country, the theme of an environment’s effect on those who live in it is explicitly in the text of the show, taking place in an Alaskan town during a month-long period where the sun is never seen. It’s a cold, stark, dangerous place that no doubt molds everyone who lives there. It should be a lay-up to make an incredibly compelling and creative intro with the material given. How the hell does “Bury a Friend” set to the most bland, CGI, cookie-cutter, Netflix-original-looking intro visuals communicate that? It’s an intro that is not meant to evoke anything other than “I know that song!” and Tweet about it or put it on TikTok. To me, the intro encapsulates everything wrong with the creative mindset that HBO brought to this season. Instead of choosing a song that works with the story being told, they went with something that was marketable and would get people talking, hoping to sucker in some Billie Eilish fans who otherwise would not have watched the show.

The season attempts to tackle the injustices done to indigenous communities in Alaska, but instead of doing or saying anything substantive on the subject, Night Country kind of treats the subject of the injustices done to Native Americans as if it were nothing more than a plot device. Was Pizzolato qualified to tackle the subject instead? Fuck no, not one bit. The man who when writing his first female main character for True Detective gave her the line “I just really like big dicks, not just the length but the girth” might NOT have been the right person to tackle the subject of what ultimately amounts to a revenge fantasy for Native American genocide, but his weird, poor decisions probably would have made for a more interesting train wreck than what we got, and I certainly would have welcomed a bigger mess.

To put it bluntly, True Detective: Night Country is a cowardly show that wants to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to separate itself from the shackles of the expectations from the previous three seasons and be its own thing with a new creative voice at the helm for a new generation of fans. It also wants to reference the 1st season as much as humanly possible and tease the idea that these two seasons will be connected, that this is not only a spiritual sequel to that season, but a literal sequel. The Tuttle family is name-dropped a time or two early on, Cohle’s family is referenced and the spiral/loop design that The Yellow King puts on dead bodies and Cohle hallucinates shows up constantly throughout this season, for what is ultimately no reason and has no pay off. All of these references are cynically dropped into the show for the purpose of fan-service, because none of it has any pay-off whatsoever. The only reason that the Tuttle family is funding the TSALAL research facility is so a character can say the name and audiences will go “OHHHH MAN! I KNOW WHAT THAT IS!” and Tweet about it that they understood the reference and get discourse going about if Rust Cohle is going to show up and team up with Danvers and Navarro to take down the Tuttle Corporation, or whatever. I’m glad that I’m not an idiot and understand the point of Cohle’s arc and that him showing up again in any capacity would be absolutely dreadful, but if I was an idiot and actually wanted that to happen, I’d be disappointed in this, because the way that Night Country handles fan-service and references is tantamount to a scam.

Night Country is the first season without the involvement of creator and writer Nic Pizzolato. While the first three seasons of the show had ups and downs, it is very apparent with the inclusion of this newest season, written and directed by Issa Lopez, that Pizzolato had a distinct authorial voice that is sorely lacking in Night Country. That’s one of the most respectable things about the 2nd season of True Detective to me. For all of its flaws, Season 2 never compromised the vision of the show, developing themes from Season 1 while leaving its narrative and iconography alone, never referencing it once. Season 2 feels like it was botched by a real, living and breathing human being, with a real vision for a story that they wanted to tell. That vision was not fully realized and needed another draft or two, sure, but it gives it a human quality that keeps me returning to that season every couple of years. The vision of Night Country is that of a faceless corporation trying to cash-in on a recognizable property that they own, squeezing as much profit out of an IP as humanly possible like the mine that dominates the Alaskan town in this season. It’s a disposable streaming show that is tailor made for social media masquerading as a prestige HBO drama.

Now, let's talk about the show proper, finally, and I will be doing a lot of comparing to other seasons here, I apologize for that. The biggest problem with True Detective: Night Country is that it has terrible, static, flat characters. The two main characters, Danvers, played by Jodie Foster, and Navarro, played by Kali Reis, have absolutely no dynamic with one another. Neither do any of the other characters in the season, for that matter. Scenes of characters interacting are actually agonzing to watch in this season, it’s like watching blocks of wood on screen. Every dynamic is insisted upon without actually showing it. It’s a shame too, because Jodie Foster is obviously fantastic, one of the best to ever do it, and I had never seen Kali Reis before but honestly, I think she might have the stuff, she mostly holds her own with Jodie Foster pretty well, so it’s a shame that neither of them are given good material to work with.

I am going to be extraordinarily cruel to Night Country and compare the character dynamics here to the dynamic between Rust and Marty in the 1st season. In Season 1, we have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Rust and Marty, who are established right away to be complete polar opposites from one another. This is aided by the framing device of the season, which is that both characters are being interviewed and asked questions about the other, but it is also aided by their behavior and the way that they interact with each other. We get why Marty doesn’t like Rust right from their first interactions with each other; he thinks he’s an annoying, pretentious contrarian whose pessimistic worldview conflicts with his own and makes him uncomfortable. Inversely, we see why Rust does not like Marty, and how the two of them are diametrically opposed to one another, but are forced to work together to solve the case, and their dynamic grows and changes over the years that we see them on the show. CONFLICT! The dynamic between the two characters makes them more distinct, accentuating their beliefs and behavior as individuals. If you were to look at a dialogue transcript from Rust and Marty where it did not tell you which character had which line, you would be able to distinguish Marty’s lines from Rust’s because of how distinct those characters are from one another. The same cannot be said for Danvers and Navarro; they have no dynamic with one another because they feel like the same character, as if two Rust’s or two Marty’s are onscreen. Every conversation between them blurs into boring, blah, uncreative filler dialogue to get exposition across. The two of them spend very little time together actually working together to solve the murder.

The second biggest problem with Night Country is that it is fucking boring and repetitive, with storytelling is simply uninspired and dull. I think the best way to describe this season is as if Season 1 was exclusively the part of the story that takes place after Marty and Rust leave the police station in 2012 with none of the development that took place in 1995 or 2002, and occasionally flash back to the shoot out and if it stalled as much as possible revealing that Rust’s daughter died instead of in the first episode. It is six episodes long, each about an hour long, it feels like it could have been condensed into literally one or two. The same three or four scenes happen over and over again, lingering on every boring, lazy plot point for an hour at a time, like a car spinning its wheels in the mud. It attempts to make itself seem more dynamic by incorporating flashbacks, when it would have been much better if the flashbacks that we cut to constantly were incorporated into the narrative. As is, it feels like it is insisting upon its own importance. The show flashes back to a prior adventure with Navarro and Danvers going to a crime scene where Navarro kills a suspect and the two of them stage it as a suicide, which supposedly was the inciting incident for their insisted upon “conflict.” The first time we see this scene, it is edited as if it is a hint at a plotpoint or a reveal that is to be expanded upon later, as Danvers describes the scene to another character, telling him that the suspect had committed suicide before they arrived at the scene. And then, throughout the rest of the series until episode 5, they keep cutting back to this scene as if they thought that it wasn’t as extraordinarily obvious as it is, treating the ultimate reveal that Navarro killed the guy as if it was a huge shock.

The third problem is that the starting point of the show is an uninteresting point in the story. The show begins by making the same mistake that Season 2 made: by not immediately starting with the mystery right off the bat, instead waiting until the end of the first episode to find the murder victims forces every subsequent episode to have to pick up the slack and make up for what the previous episode should have, feeling like the show is playing catch-up with itself until the show ends unceremoniously. 

So what would I have done differently? Instead of beginning with the TSALAL station found vacant, and the bodies found in the ice at the end of the episode, I would have started with the death of Annie Kowtok. “Annie K.” as they call her, not only would make much more sense to serve as an inciting incident than the TSALAL scientists, she would have been a much more sympathetic victim. That is the other mistake that Night Country repeats from Season 2, the victims at the center of the mystery are not really sympathetic characters, so there is no feeling of injustice that needs to be resolved in solving the murder. In Season 1 and 3, the victims are those impoverished by an environment that grinds them up and allows them to be taken advantage of by those in power. In 2 and Night Country, the victims are those in power being murdered out of revenge for the crimes they committed. The catharsis is in the crime itself, not finding justice for those who have suffered. Instead of finding catharsis in solving the murders and uncovering societal ill so deeply rooted into the American way of life that it is almost difficult to comprehend, Night Country attempts a half-assed “girls get it done” conclusion and falls on its face in the process.

It would have worked much better if Danvers and Navarro were partners from the get-go, and were tasked with solving the Annie K. murder in Ennis, Alaska. Maybe Danvers is new in town, transferred in from a bigger department, maybe with a more cynical edge to her, but Navarro is a local, giving her a more optimistic approach to policing in her small town, as well as personal motive to solve this murder. Eventually, the case could have led them to the house where the guy beat his girlfriend to death, and this time, on top of beating his girlfriend to death, the guy could be a suspect in the Annie K. murder, giving Navarro ample motivation to kill his bitch ass. This creates a rift between them, as Danvers does not like the fact that she has to cover for Navarro killing this guy, but goes along with it after the Annie K. murder is pinned on the dead guy, and the case is closed, similar to Reggie LeDoux from Season 1, and the shootouts halfway through Season 2 and Season 3. It’s a plot point that has been done to death in murder mysteries even outside of True Detective, but much like Rust and Marty’s head-butting relationship, it is a trope of the genre for a reason. This would give the characters a sense of false closure, and things would go back to normal in Ennis. Now that the mystery was seemingly solved, Navarro would see the less glamorous side of being a police officer, working as a class traitor against the indigenous population of the town in their protests against the mine and systemic injustices against them. The mine would continue to dominate the town and pollute the water system, things would be business as usual until the workers at the TSALAL station are found dead, and the investigation as we see it in the show could start up and play out similar to what we see in the show. Etc etc.

The supernatural angle that this season employs is lazy and stupid as well, but that goes without saying. The previous three seasons also played with abstract ideas presented as if they could maybe be supernatural occurrences, and the way in which they are incorporated into the story and the way they are executed is surreal and striking, but also motivated by the characters: otherworldly visions, liminal spaces and surreal nightmares. However, the cold, hard reality of the explanations for the “supernatural” elements of the series are not only more existentially terrifying, they also lend themselves to a lot more thematic poignancy than if it kept the door open for the supernatural; Rust has basically fried his brain with drugs and hallucinates from time to time, Ray pictures himself in some sort of purgatory while having a near-death experience after being shot in the chest with a shotgun, and Wayne has dementia, causing his memories to blur together into nightmarish, surreal sequences. In Night Country, there’s just fucking ghosts running around, and it is executed like it’s from The Conjuring, complete with jumpscares and horror movie music stings. It feels like it is TRYING, a word that I cannot emphasize harder, to employ some of the same supernatural qualities of something like Twin Peaks but fails to do so in any capacity.

I think that's about it. In a show with some very low lows, I think this is the lowest. It feels like to the True Detective name what The Rise of Skywalker does to the Star Wars franchise; just a depressing, corporate, fan-service riddled product that is more streaming service fodder than it is a work of art. True Detective: Night Country is definitely the weakest, most forgettable, boring and corporate season of True Detective, but likely not the worst we will get. The day I am writing this, the 5th season of True Detective was announced by HBO. Hopefully, the next season will be better, but honestly, keeping with the Star Wars analogy, it will likely be akin to what Disney did with Star Wars post the sequel trilogy, so I’m not going to hold my breath. I might not even watch it, which is the worst outcome I could have had after this season.