True Detective is again. Wait. What’s True Detective?
It’s been almost 10 years since HBO launched audiences to True Detective in Jan. 2014. A TV present with a reputation so goofy that it completely needed to be good for anybody to take it severely, the primary season of creator Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology drama was placing in its pairing of a resurgent Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in a homicide thriller with an eerie Bizarre Fiction subtext and an all-timer title sequence.
Successive seasons of True Detective didn’t be a sensation the best way its award-winning first was. After a much-delayed third season arrived in 2019, the collection was successfully placed on ice, and Pizzolatto’s working relationship with HBO got here to an finish (whereas one other one at FX didn’t even take off).
HBO, nonetheless, nonetheless believes within the magic of that first season sufficient to place some juice behind a brand new installment. Whereas it’s probably meant to standalone like different True Detective seasons, Night time Nation — which stars Jodie Foster as Detective Liz Danvers and Kali Reis as her reluctant accomplice Detective Evangeline Navarro on the hunt for males lacking from an Arctic analysis station — is unquestionably attempting to woo again followers.
The trailer for True Detective: Night time Nation is filled with callbacks to season 1, in methods which are structural (a cop being interviewed a few harrowing case), stylistic (darkish and moody large photographs with the suggestion of the supernatural) and textual (the spooky spiral from the primary season is again).
The trailer works exhausting to make these connections extraordinarily apparent — the spiral was a little bit of Lovecraftian symbolism that stood in for the crime ring that season 1 protagonists Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Harrelson) observe down collectively. The spiral was additionally invoked in season 3, itself an try and return to the present to its roots after a wildly unpopular second season.
However on-line, viewers of the trailer additionally observed that there is likely to be extra to Night time Nation’s season 1 ties than spooky symbolism: The story is ready in Alaska, and in season 1’s fourth episode, “Who Goes There,” Rust Cohle claims he went there to go to a dying father that nobody can verify was ever there.
Little tidbits like this are what made True Detective a success: On its face, it was a seedy crime drama, nevertheless it was additionally one constructed for the fan concept period, sprinkling in ominous references to Bizarre Fiction works like Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 work The King in Yellow, which, relying in your perspective, enriched the collection or in the end proved to be a waste of time.
That’s in the end what everybody, from HBO to on a regular basis followers, hope True Detective: Night time Nation delivers: An engrossing thriller to take a position about, and pore over each body of. Hopefully showrunner Issa López and producer Barry Jenkins discover that magic once more. Yellowjackets can’t do all of it by itself.
True Detective: Night time Nation will premiere on HBO and stream on Max “later this yr.”
