True Detective Season Premiere: No Pressure, Right?
Photo: HBO
Yes, pressure. A yes to pressure. That’s what show creator Nic Pizzolatto certainly must have been feeling after the acclaim and huge success that season one of True Detective was. Not many people were expecting an anthology series, with a first season being a deep philosophical thriller set in the swamps of Louisiana, would become a cultural phenomenon. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were the most compelling duo on television, gripping critics and audiences alike. True Detective was it.
Season 2 is a whole new ball game – it’s basically a whole new show. Forget the first season. Forget the story, the characters, the setting – everything. Season 2 brings a whole new story, new characters, and a wildly different setting. It’s a new page. No, it’s a new book. Judge it like you would a new show, and the premiere was a new pilot you just happened to check out.
Having said that, the premiere, judged simply as a new pilot, was uneven and shaky. The individual character stories were somewhat clichéd and disappointing. Was the episode so terrible that you won’t give it another go? No. It was not. You would expect that individual stories to come together somehow as the season plays out. Just give it time. That’s what I chose to take from the premiere. With time, this show and the characters it introduced might deliver something we have not seen before.
Let’s jump into the story. The show introduces four central characters set in Vinci, a small town in Los Angeles, who will get involved in a political corruption/murder case at the end of the premiere. We know how this story goes, we know they’ll end up together and one point, and that’s how the premiere closes.
We have a divorced, alcoholic, druggie, dirty cop in Ray Velcoro, portrayed by Colin Farrell, who pretty much plays his normal type of character. We’ve seen him do it before. The character looks like a cliché, so many inner demons to battle, and so little time. We see Ray beat up the father of the son who bullied his kid, beating the shit out of the father in front of his son on their front lawn. He also got the information out of his own kid by bullying him at school. Yes, great father, who, in all likeliness, probably isn’t even his father – more on that coming up.
Ray is basically an enforcer for another central character, Vince Vaughn’s Frank Seymon, a presumed businessman and crime boss. The connection between Ray and Frank is established using a flashback – Ray walks into a bar, Frank gives him the information of the guy who raped Ray’s wife (and nine months later, a baby was born), and seemingly puts himself in Frank’s debt for years. He still does his dirty work for him years later.
Frank is a corrupt businessman about to launch a big deal, but he still has to reach an agreement with another party. A story appears in the local newspaper, uncovering the corruption going on in the city manager’s office, and the manager happens to be Frank’s corrupt partner, Casper. Casper goes missing, and Ray is put on the case. We see Ray put the hurt on a journalist, waiting for him outside his apartment, the journalist being the writer who uncovered the city’s corruption. Just another perk of being in Frank’s debt. Near the end of the episode, the two of them meet in a lonely pub – the job’s done. Ray and Frank seemed to have developed something what resembles a friendship over the years, Frank being concerned with the state of Ray’s custody battle with his now ex-wife. He gave him his lawyer. How sweet.
The third central character we meet is Ani Bezzerides, a messy divorced woman who struggles to believe in love, and subsequently can’t perform in the bedroom, and drinks herself into a stupor, portrayed by a Rachel McAdams who plays against type. Apparently, sex for Rachel is a bad thing, if you can deduce that from a conversation with her sister who does webcam porn for a living. Rachel’s performance, and the character in general, made her the most interesting thing about the premiere. I’m definitely on board with that. Ani and her partner go to a family’s house to give them a foreclosure letter – very exciting and thrilling police work – and the woman of the house says they should rather go look for her missing sister, i.e. do some real police work for a change. This leads them to a religious or spiritual rehab centre where Ani sees her hippie father. We see they have a constrained relationship.
The fourth central character is Taylor Kitsch’s Paul Woodrugh, a scarred war veteran who now patrols the highway on a little motorcycle. In an encounter with his girlfriend, or whatever he likes to call her, he needs Viagra to get his penis to do his job, locking himself in the bathroom before they do the deed. He never spends the night and she ain’t happy. Turns out, Paul has suicide tendencies, or just has a sick way of getting a thrill, as he speeds on his motorcycle over an open road in the dead of night. He comes to a stop after he almost loses control of the motorbike, and it’s there that he sees a man sitting across the word. It’s the city manager, Casper, and he’s pretty dead. Calls are made, and Ani and Ray both end up at the side of the road.
And scene.
The individual stories were very uneven, Farrell’s Ray coming off quite predictable and tired. The writing let the premiere down the most, but this is where the trust between creator and viewers comes in. We need to trust that Pizzolatto knows where he’s going with this season. I think he earned that trust in season one. The least we can do is give him the benefit of the doubt.
We can call him a one trick pony once the season is over, but until then, let’s take it episode by episode. It can’t get that much worse, can it?
