True Detective

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DarkImbecile
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Re: True Detective

#226 Post by DarkImbecile » Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:33 am

mfunk9786 wrote: Take note though that the reviews are of the first three episodes, and if I remember correctly, the first season didn't quite get going until further in than that. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Agreed... I remember liking the first season but not being really pulled in until the fourth "The Tracking Shot" episode, with the truly great fifth episode being the peak of the series.

I am somewhat disheartened that much of the criticism seems to either explicitly or implicitly point to the absence of a strong, singular, unifying directorial presence, which I've long felt was the real strength of the first season, even more so than Pizzolatto's occult shadings or the star power of the leads. Hopefully this season will also come together and not be brought down substantially by the standard premium cable mix of solid but not necessarily A-list talent behind the camera.

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mfunk9786
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Re: True Detective

#227 Post by mfunk9786 » Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:51 am

Agreed a thousand percent. I don't understand how HBO, after the success of the first season, couldn't find a young director to take on the entirety of the second season, unless they read the scripts and ran in the other direction, which I suppose could be the case.

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mistakaninja
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Re: True Detective

#228 Post by mistakaninja » Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:37 pm

Might have been a schedule issue. The first season was set up with director and main cast before they even took it to HBO. They probably had two years to work everything out. That window shrank substantially for the second series.

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Oedipax
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Re: True Detective

#229 Post by Oedipax » Thu Jun 18, 2015 4:23 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:Take note though that the reviews are of the first three episodes, and if I remember correctly, the first season didn't quite get going until further in than that. I'm cautiously optimistic.
I had the totally opposite impression of the first season - the first 3 were among the very best, peaking around 4/5, after which it became significantly less interesting. I really have no hope for S2 at this point. It's just that everything Pizzolatto has said in interviews about S1, and the choice to not bring Fukunaga back on as well as not go with another single director for S2 leads me to believe the things most of us found worthwhile in S1 have been jettisoned in S2, quite deliberately, and that the show's success was based on a kind of misunderstanding or accident on the part of its creators. Of course, I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong there...

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: True Detective

#230 Post by Andre Jurieu » Fri Jun 19, 2015 1:34 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:I don't understand how HBO, after the success of the first season, couldn't find a young director to take on the entirety of the second season...
This is completely just conjecture on my part, but - based on everything I've read over the past few years - I would not be surprised if Pizzolatto allowed ego and professional jealousy to cloud his judgement for S2, whereby he may have demanded that they avoid using one director in an effort to ensure that he receives the majority of the creative credit instead of sharing the spotlight.
Last edited by Andre Jurieu on Fri Jun 19, 2015 4:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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DarkImbecile
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Re: True Detective

#231 Post by DarkImbecile » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:08 pm

That's my concern as well, especially after the critical conjecture about the supposedly unflattering caricature of Fukunaga featured early in the new season. If that's the case and this season of TD falters while Fukunaga's star continues to rise with Beasts of No Nation later this year, we'll know where the credit for season one belongs. I hope that's not the case and that both Pizzolatto and Fukunaga turn out to be major talents, but we'll see...

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Re: True Detective

#232 Post by Perkins Cobb » Fri Jun 19, 2015 2:56 pm

Oddly enough, I have two sources who worked on the Season 1 (or for HBO when it was being made). One of them told me Fukunaga was a total pro and Pizzolatto is nuts; the other said that when HBO would ask for editing changes Pizzolatto would cry (literally) until he got his way.

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mistakaninja
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Re: True Detective

#233 Post by mistakaninja » Fri Jun 19, 2015 3:47 pm

Fits with his brief and disruptive stints in the writers rooms for The Killing and Magic City.

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krnash
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Re: True Detective

#234 Post by krnash » Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:45 pm

Let me get this straight...there are multiple pages here trying to dissect why this season isn't as good as the first and trying to diagnose why Pizzolatto actually isn't talented, but none of you guys have actually seen a second of this season yet, correct?

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Re: True Detective

#235 Post by swo17 » Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:50 pm

Merely 10 posts speculating as to why critics who have seen several episodes have done an about face on the show.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: True Detective

#236 Post by Andre Jurieu » Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:53 pm

I can't speak for anyone else, but my comments above have nothing to do with any perceived quality of the second season of True Detective. My comments also don't attempt to state conclusively whether or not Pizzolatto is talented. My response was regarding another forum member's disappointment that HBO was not able to hire a single director to helm all of the episodes in Season 2. I'm hoping that I will be engaged by Season 2. I will not make any comments regarding its quality until after I watch at least one episode in Season 2.
Last edited by Andre Jurieu on Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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krnash
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Re: True Detective

#237 Post by krnash » Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:55 pm

swo17 wrote:Merely 10 posts speculating as to why critics who have seen several episodes have done an about face on the show.
I know, and I'm only half serious. But I do find the speculation pretty humorous. Especially since no one on Earth who isn't involved in the show has seen more than 3 episodes of it. That's an awfully small sample size to judge. Critics don't watch 37% of a movie and stop and write a review on it, because that would be absurd.

I'm just saying...this writer has earned our trust with this show until we've seen it through and can judge it for ourselves.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: True Detective

#238 Post by Andre Jurieu » Fri Jun 19, 2015 5:59 pm

krnash wrote:Critics don't watch 37% of a movie and stop and write a review on it, because that would be absurd.
Uh ... are you sure about that? I'm not saying it's not absurd behavior or that it should be condoned, but over the past few years I've read/heard multiple critics state that they frequently walk out of screenings and then write reviews on the quality of the overall product.

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Re: True Detective

#239 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Sun Jun 21, 2015 11:25 pm

I'm going to give this season a shot, but frankly I wasn't too bowled over by the first episode.

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Re: True Detective

#240 Post by Roger Ryan » Mon Jun 22, 2015 8:50 am

While I enjoyed the first episode, I found the following things to be distractingly inexplicable...
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- I'll buy that Bezzerides orchestrates a raid on the home-based web-cam porn business out of concern for her sister, but how likely is it that on a separate investigation she encounters a woman whose missing sister worked at a religious retreat run by Bezzerides' father who happens to be making a reportedly rare appearance at the retreat the very afternoon his daughter visits?

- How is it that L.A.- based detective Ilinca has never heard of Vinci, a town supposedly only a few miles outside of downtown Los Angeles (was this supposed to be meta-comment on the fact that Vinci is fictional)?

- Why is the sun rising in the west during the final shot of the episode?

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Re: True Detective

#241 Post by jindianajonz » Mon Jun 22, 2015 11:27 am

Regarding your second question,
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I don't think it's too unusual that somebody wouldn't know about the small towns of the greater LA area. I've lived in SoCal my whole life and drive through LA fairly regularly, and looking at Google maps there's all sorts of small towns I drive past that I've never heard of- Barddale, Lakeview Terrace, Crecenta Heights, and other places. The thing about LA is that it's very spread out, and thus has a large periphery filled with small commuter towns that are easy to overlook. It also doesn't help that everything melds together so smoothly that you often don't realize when you enter a new city.

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Re: True Detective

#242 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jun 22, 2015 11:59 am

Unless there's some explanation of it later on, the McAdams stuff was incredibly weak - but besides that I'm mostly on board with this, despite it obviously missing a strong directorial vision.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: True Detective

#243 Post by Andre Jurieu » Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:03 pm

Agreed on the rather unbelievable coincidence in the McAdams storyline. It wasn't bad enough to ruin anything for me, but I just kept wondering why they didn't include the
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raid in a later episode, as it wouldn't have really changed the dynamics much in the scene between McAdams and Morse.


Lin did fairly well as a replacement, but it did feel a little bit like someone attempting to maintain a "house" style for the show.

Did anyone notice that Cary Fukunaga is still an executive producer for the show. That's not a bad perk of the severance package.

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Re: True Detective

#244 Post by Professor Wagstaff » Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:49 pm

I though Lin did a decent job too, though I wish Friedkin had a chance to direct (was he ever a contender or just publicly making his availibility known to HBO?)

I do wish the show had a more unified directorial vision, but I also felt that the show was hampered by the writing, partiularly trying to introduce so many major players upfront. What worked so effectively about introducing our leads in that first season was the narration, particularly in that it allowed McConaughey and Harrelson to do more than just deliver exposition. That narration allowed each man to lay out the complex backstories for each other in a way that felt natural. Here the directing is doing more of that work than the writing and some of the details like Kitsch's burns or McAdam's bedroom manner that have been alluded to feel like withholding because I still don't have a hang on who these folks are. A scene like the car ride of at the beginning of last season's premiere (where McConaughey establishes his nihilistic philosophies) so effectively established the everything we need to know about the characters that the mysteries of, say, what exactly Rust Cohle did as a detective in Texas becomes less important because Harrelson's Hart tells enough to paint a pretty vivid picture. I feel like the Farrell scene where he talks to his lawyer should do that, but it doesn't.

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Re: True Detective

#245 Post by mfunk9786 » Mon Jun 22, 2015 4:15 pm

Andre Jurieu wrote:Agreed on the rather unbelievable coincidence in the McAdams storyline. It wasn't bad enough to ruin anything for me, but I just kept wondering why they didn't include the
SpoilerShow
raid in a later episode, as it wouldn't have really changed the dynamics much in the scene between McAdams and Morse.


Lin did fairly well as a replacement, but it did feel a little bit like someone attempting to maintain a "house" style for the show.

Did anyone notice that Cary Fukunaga is still an executive producer for the show. That's not a bad perk of the severance package.
McConaughey and Harrelson, too! $$$$$

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Re: True Detective

#246 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jun 22, 2015 7:06 pm

And here I thought Bloodline was going to be the least interesting TV show I sat through this year! I'll probably give this the same shot I gave that, three episodes, to convince me to keep with it, but man, this just wasn't good at all. Dull characters, hilariously "serious" emoting and music cues, and an already complicated storyline that isn't interesting enough so far to justify the energy needed to keep it straight. Take the last shot, of the assorted characters coming together. So what? Why is this given dramatic energy with the pained emotional looks each exchanges? The whole episode was like that. So what, so what, so what-- over and over. Maybe/hopefully the series starts doing something else that makes these set-ups into payoffs, but I'm not optimistic. I don't think the problem is with the actors or the director, this seems pretty flawed from a ground-floor creation standpoint and so Pizzolatto has the most to answer for. Maybe he knows what he's doing, but I can't imagine a less compelling opening to a new limited run series-- first episodes supposed to leave you wanting more, but this left me wanting something else.

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Re: True Detective

#247 Post by Perkins Cobb » Thu Jun 25, 2015 2:06 pm

Andre Jurieu wrote:Did anyone notice that Cary Fukunaga is still an executive producer for the show. That's not a bad perk of the severance package.
I think that's a pretty standard contractual thing for pilot directors these days. Or anybody who negotiates an EP credit and then leaves (William Petersen is still an EP on CSI!).

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Re: True Detective

#248 Post by feihong » Fri Jun 26, 2015 12:36 am

Different than probably the majority of people on here, I far preferred this first episode of the second season to most of the episodes from the first season.

I found the cross-cutting between principal characters a much nicer effect than most people here seem to. I thought it was interesting to see each figure developed in similar ways across a number of scenes. To me it added a special charge to the ending shots, where the detectives were staring at each other. Over the episode we've seen each of them to be more perceptive, or at least more sensitive, than their colleagues, but also perhaps more prone to making crucial mistakes. So the look they give each other at the end suggests to me that these people are sizing each other up, and perhaps in some sense anticipating the challenges each will pose to the others. To me the episode was rife with tension in a way the previous season was not; each of these three detectives seems to be hurtling towards a breakdown, or an explosion of some kind. I hope what this means is that we'll be looking at characters who are more raw and exposed than those of the previous season. Cohle and Hart were very protected by the layers of story they were weaving from episode to episode. Their level of perception was high above the game, in a sense, and they were playing the forces around them. So far, Velcoro, Bezzerides and Woodrugh are much more vulnerable. They are not in control of their story; none of them know what their story is yet. They all seem less capable of having a handle on the story, once they begin to perceive the edges of it.

The things I could have done without in the previous season seem to be mostly gone in this one from the get-go. No one in the new season speaks with quite the tone of Cohle's overbearing monologues, and the "yellow king" stuff, which never really fully developed in season one, has no parallel in the new season.

Instead, we get a very clever interpolation of the recent turmoil in the city of Vernon, California, and the recreation of the atmosphere of Vernon in the town of "Vinci" is, I think, fairly apt. Lighter industry goes on in Vernon today than what seems to be going on in Vinci, but the way in which fancy buildings, intimate living quarters and slums all butt up against enormous, hulking factories is true to the look and feel of Vernon. And I like the idea of the detectives digging into a crime that is mysterious without actual mysticism.
I don't think it's too unusual that somebody wouldn't know about the small towns of the greater LA area. I've lived in SoCal my whole life and drive through LA fairly regularly, and looking at Google maps there's all sorts of small towns I drive past that I've never heard of- Barddale, Lakeview Terrace, Crecenta Heights, and other places. The thing about LA is that it's very spread out, and thus has a large periphery filled with small commuter towns that are easy to overlook. It also doesn't help that everything melds together so smoothly that you often don't realize when you enter a new city.
I'd like to back up this post as well, with my own similar observation. I live in Hermon, on the Northeastern edge of the City of Los Angeles, and I commute daily to Santa Monica. The drive is only 20 miles (and sometimes takes upwards of 3 hours with L.A. traffic), but my coworkers––most of whom live in Santa Monica or in neighboring communities like Venice––had never heard of Hermon. A city like Vernon, the clear basis for the city of Vinci, is relatively unknown to most people I know in Hermon, or in the San Gabriel Valley. The area is just so large that one is unlikely to have dealings in more than a couple of parts of Los Angeles county. The freeway shots associated with the Vinci scenes looked like the Golden State interchange, known as the San Bernadino Split, out near Pomona. If Vinci was out that way it would be far Northeast of central Los Angeles. Woodrugh was biking in Ventura county, on the 101, along the coast. If that is near his digs, it's unlikely anything in his life takes him near Vinci. Bezzerides is also a Ventura County sheriff, I think. It's Northwest of San Bernadino, very far away. It's unlikely that any of them know the small cities far, far East of them.

Another thing I noted and wondered about: I read a bit about the noir references in the show, and I began to see more of them. I assume that the Rachel McAdams character is named for A.I. Bezzerides, the screenwriter of Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground, Thieves Highway, etc. Has anyone confirmed that in an interview? I haven't seen anyone else making note of that, but it doesn't seem like a coincidence.


I thought the first new episode was very thick with atmosphere. I liked Justin Lin's direction. People forget he directed Better Luck Tomorrow before all the Fast & the Furious movies, and I found some of the more incisive filmmaker who did Better Luck Tomorrow in the new episode. People in the new episode look at one another in ways that speak volumes. I like Cary Fukunaga's work very much, but I don't think the new season is suffering so far from his absence. There is a new tone that fits the new place. These characters are all miserable, and sick in their souls, and the new camera style, editing style, and the new location all speak to a slightly different feeling, of being burned out and on a collision course with loss, or an explosion of some kind. I think it's a very appropriate tone for L.A., both more immediate and more melancholy. I also was surprised to see Fukunaga's name still on the show, especially considering that advance reviewers mention an Asian–American film director character in later episodes which is meant to be a very unflattering jab at Fukunaga. I am sure those kind of behind–the-scenes politics are a grim and complicated business.

Anyways, I thought the show more streamlined, robust and interesting this time around...to me it seems a promising start. The most interesting aspect of the previous season was the way the title challenged us to evaluate the detectives the story presented to us, and make up our minds about them. Were they "true" in pursuit of their goals? Were they redeemable, in spite of their many compromises? The mystery hardly seemed to matter––which was good, because it didn't really develop as richly as it might have. This new season begins by inviting us to evaluate our new detectives in the same manner. They are all flawed, and compromised in similar, complementary ways. They are all deeply, deeply troubled. Are they redeemable? Can they live with themselves? And this time around, the mystery seems more urgent and interesting. Hopefully it can stay interesting, and keep developing in worthwhile directions.

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Re: True Detective

#249 Post by flyonthewall2983 » Mon Jun 29, 2015 10:42 am

Last night's episode was a little better. I enjoyed the scene between Vaughan's character and Ritchie Coster, who had some good lines last night.
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Possibly killing off the Farrell character was unexpected, but I'm glad that it's kind of thrown a wrench into the works. Gives me a little more hope that this season might be good.

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Andre Jurieu
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Re: True Detective

#250 Post by Andre Jurieu » Mon Jun 29, 2015 1:39 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Last night's episode was a little better. I enjoyed the scene between Vaughan's character and Ritchie Coster, who had some good lines last night.
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Possibly killing off the Farrell character was unexpected, but I'm glad that it's kind of thrown a wrench into the works. Gives me a little more hope that this season might be good.
Yeah, that move was certainly unexpected. Only part that makes me anxious is
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(- if it is a genuine plot-twist - which remaining actor is now expected to take more of the central role and do a greater portion of the heavy lifting. I have more confidence in McAdams and Vaughn, but much less if they expect Kitsch to take a bigger share of the screen-time (though they did seem to hint at a somewhat interesting change in behaviour for him during his last moment on screen)...
... aaaaand reading some stuff about future episodes, it sounds like the concluding events in Epsiode 2 are not what they appear to be on the surface, but who knows.
I did think the second episode was a notable improvement from the first one of the season, but it's not a great sign when I'm more intrigued by all the supporting characters than the leads.

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