True Detective: What The Hell Happened?

From left right: A depressed cop with trust and relationship troubles, a depressed cop with an alcoholism problem, a depressed mob boss with money issues, and a depressed cop who is repressing his homosexual urges.
Cheery!
 "Is it me, or was that of incredibly high production value? I'm offended by how much work was put into making that video." - Tim, The Life and Times of Tim, S01E05





Well, the second season of HBO's True Detective has officially come and gone, and in retrospect, it was disappointing. Not necessarily bad television, but when compared and contrasted to the groundbreaking first season, all season two did was disappoint. Thus, while of course we'll cover everything in the finale and the episodes leading up to it, this article will also explore exactly what went wrong with the second edition of the crime drama? Why, when the first season had such earth-shattering good reviews, did the second one only bring lame ones?

The one in the middle is a mob boss.

Let's start with the actual content. One of the biggest talking points (and also non-talking points in the actual show) was Taylor Kitsch's character, Paul Woodrugh. The storyline around the most junior of our four stars was that he had come back from the war, become an officer, accepted sexual favors from a woman he pulled over, been kicked off of his highway bike, and then found career redemption when he was put on the Caspere case, the murder mystery of the season. In addition to this, he had impregnated his girlfriend, but his relationship was hindered by his strange, incestual mother, and the fact that he was a repressed gay man, hiding it behind a macho exterior. In essence, the character should have offered up... something that could help the plot along. However, whether it was the writing or Taylor Kitsch's bland acting, the character never came to life, and when Paul was killed off in the last moments of the seventh episode, all I felt was relief that we wouldn't have to watch him anymore. Part of my theory around the character's failure was that with four central characters, he could have been overlooked and not given enough screentime. However, I don't actually think that was it. We saw Paul for extended amounts of time, but his dialogue never seemed to kick into gear, being almost like a boring, repressed Rust Cohle. In the end, Kitsch played the character like a slightly less terrible Milo Ventimiglia.

Moving right along, we come to Ani Bezzerides, Rachel McAdams's character. Ani, short for Antigone, was daughter to a hippie leader from the redwood areas of California. However, while young, Ani was kidnapped and molested, leading to a scarred upbringing in the midst of an already odd one. Now as a detective, Ani was sent to lead the investigation into Caspere's death. Though one of the more interesting characters in this season, Ani's plot remained far weaker than any in the show's first installment. She spent most of her time moping around, looking grungy while still the pretty Rachel McAdams we know. And, toward the end of the season, Ani had a rather forced romance with Colin Farrell's Ray Velcoro. She ended not on her back, like most of the characters in the show, instead escaping to Venezuela with Ray's new son from their one-time love affair. The problem with Ani Bezzerides wasn't as severe as it was with Taylor Kitsch's Paul Woodrugh, but similar complaints could be brought up. McAdams wasn't amazing by any stretch of the imagination, but she certainly wasn't bad. What we got was a character that didn't exactly compel, but didn't really detract either. The problem with a character like this is that it's almost as if the show could take them or leave them. By adding a female protagonist to fulfill the anti-feminist complaints True Detective received in the first season, it ended up delivering a character that just felt unecessary in an overall sense.
The one on the right is a mob boss.

We come now to the de facto lead of the show, Mr. Colin Farrell. Farrell was unquestionably the best performance of the four main characters, but even so, he still missed the mark a bit. Ray Velcoro, the character, was a depressed, alcoholic detective, just coming back from a rough divorce with his wife due to Velcoro murdering his wife's rapist. This information, of course, was relayed to him through Vince Vaughn's character, the mob boss Frank Semyon. He is put on the Caspere case mostly to screw him over in an un-winnable battle, mostly so that his corrupt bosses can squash him. However, during his time on the case, he reports all of his findings to Semyon, Velcoro desperately wanted to be a father to his small, bullied son, but due to all of his circumstances, could never be the man he wanted to be. In this sense, Velcoro was the living embodiment of the season's tagline: We Get the World we Deserve. However, beyond the symbolism here, Velcoro was still not the protagonist we deserved. He was a corrupt man caught up in an ironic scheme of corruption centered around the Caspere case, but as a character, Velcoro really never captured the scene in the way a Hart or Cohle did.

Finally, we land on the most controversial character, Frank Semyon, played by the rather infamous Vince Vaughn. The biggest problem I had with Semyon, beyond a rather lame performance, was his actual story goal. Frank basically had lost all of his money in the death of Caspere, having been in a deal with him that had gone sour. Now, we are expected to root for a mob boss to just... get his money back. Yes, we spent episodes upon episodes trying to get across that Semyon wasn't that bad of a guy, but even so, why, in the face of three detectives with personal issues wrapped around the case, did we care if Semyon had money again or not? Furthermore, the character didn't make a ton of sense as a human. He waxed poetic in the same way that everyone written by Pizzolatto does, but at the same time, he had a light, Vince Vaughn in a comedy esq way of talking. He would casually throw out completely absurd lines of dialogue before going back to being a less entertaining Tony Soprano. His wife, played by Kelly Reilly, did her best to add intrigue to his plot, but again seemed to fall flat, only traipsing around in dresses and speaking in a 1940's femme fatale voice. Finally, there's the death of Semyon. While driving out of California to board a boat to Venezuela and meet his wife, he is captured by Mexican gangsters who were barely ever in the story, driven out to the desert, and after a brief altercation, stabbed to death. This was just... unnecessary. Frank's story arc was one of redemption, a man in a dirty career trying to go legit. But, instead, he was killed by side characters who had somehow tracked his new vehicle that was supposed to be out of reach. It was almost as if Pizzolatto was overcompensating for killing off none of the main characters in season one, so he decided to go overkill and kill off every male lead he had in the second installment.


The one on the right is still a mob boss.
Perhaps it's that the show itself just had too much going on at the same time to juggle in only eight episodes. It's almost as if Pizzolatto's rather self-indulgent writing style was spread out among all of his protagonists, making none of them pack the same punch as Rust Cohle, and giving the audience no everyman like we had in Marty Hart. Or perhaps it was the fact that Cary Joji Fukunaga left the show over creative differences and other, less impressive directors were left to sew the show together. Maybe it was the setting. The fictional city of Vinci, wrought with crime and corruption, never was as compelling a setting as the dark swamps of Louisiana.

Perhaps the issue laid in the story itself. Unlike season one, there were 9,000 side characters, all with odd names and not enough time to develop them as people, almost reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon and P. T. Anderson's Inherent Vice from last year. When we finally discovered who the killer of Caspere was, the story had so many other avenues and areas covered that the killer wasn't even the villain of the season when there were also Mexican mobsters, Russians Mobsters, corrupt policemen, corrupt government officials, and rapists running around at the same time. While the obvious focus was the characters, the extended plot was so dense that the line could never really be straddled to give us an understanding of both the characters and the plot.

In the end, though I will reiterate that the second season of HBO's True Detective was by no means bad TV, and not something I regret watching, it was certainly not the show we all wanted it to be. Whatever combination of elements led to the bad reception it garnered, it's an interesting case study of the fine line that was so successfully straddled in season one, and so easily broken in the second. It'll be most interesting to see if a third season is ever created to see if the first edition was merely a flash in the pan or if the second was just a misstep.

Either way, at least Nails survived... and we got his origin story!

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