New Season of True Detective on HBO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess I'm the only one who actually liked this season! It had its flaws, yes - but every week I enjoyed watching it.

Same.

This review section reminds me of yelp. People just like to hear themselves type.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I didn’t mind it. It’s a television show. Junk food for the mind. It’s not meant to be realistic or believable. It was good enough to tune in every week. They’ll never match season one and that’s ok.

True Detective went from being a high quality artistic show to low quality junk. I don’t mind watching junk, I like the Housewives series. BUT I expected high quality in writing, directing, cinematography and acting from the True Detective name. This season didn’t deliver on any of that, hence the major disappointment. The writing especially was horrible.

It’s like buying a Chanel bag at an high end department store and finding out it’s a fake you could have purchased in Chinatown. I would be livid if I were Nic Pizzolatto. Hell, I’m livid as just a spectator.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I hated the ending. I’m supposed to believe that an entire group of dorky scientists killed a young woman and then a group of cleaning ladies figured it out and enacted vigilante justice? Nope. No. No. Not on your life. Issa Lopez should stick to telenovelas. Shame on you HBO. Shame! Shame!

My friends all hated it. too woke.

This is such an incomplete observation. You need to be a lot more specific if you expect someone to understand what you’re trying to say here.

DP. The wokeness is so obvious PP didn’t think it needed to be made any clearer. Since you’re being obtuse, I will spell it out for you:

Bad guys = men, mostly White ones
Good guys = women, mostly Indigenous ones

Let’s see, the scientists are bad guys, so focused on their research, they don’t care about destroying a town or about polluting its pristine nature. The male cops are corrupt, too, except for Pete. Why is Pete good? Because he’s young and represents the hope that future men will be better, but only if he kills and buries his evil father and only if he submits to his Indigenous wife. Of course, Navarro’s boy toy is good for the same reason (submission) and his ethnicity.

And then there are the amazing women. Annie represents perfection, even though she’s breaking and entering and destroying private property. The ends justify the means (but only when it involves the pursuits of women—it doesn’t work that way for evil, mostly White male scientists).

Speaking of which, the cleaning ladies did nothing wrong. What’s the point of law and order? Fair trials? The police don’t care about Indigenous women, so why bother trying to use the system, ‘em I right?

No! If you look at the actual data, yes, many murders and disappearances of indigenous women do go unsolved and don’t even get investigated. But the evil White man actually has nothing to do with this. The murders and disappearances occur on autonomous Native American territory, where the evil US local governments have no jurisdiction and cannot investigate.

If you want to get real about helping indigenous women crime victims, you should put blame where blame is due: on tribal leadership.

But, that’s not here or there in this world, where the crimes committed by women are negligible and justified. It’s only men who must be punished for their transgressions.

I could go on, but I have work to do. Does that clear things up a little?

This is well put.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I hated the ending. I’m supposed to believe that an entire group of dorky scientists killed a young woman and then a group of cleaning ladies figured it out and enacted vigilante justice? Nope. No. No. Not on your life. Issa Lopez should stick to telenovelas. Shame on you HBO. Shame! Shame!

My friends all hated it. too woke.

This is such an incomplete observation. You need to be a lot more specific if you expect someone to understand what you’re trying to say here.

DP. The wokeness is so obvious PP didn’t think it needed to be made any clearer. Since you’re being obtuse, I will spell it out for you:

Bad guys = men, mostly White ones
Good guys = women, mostly Indigenous ones

Let’s see, the scientists are bad guys, so focused on their research, they don’t care about destroying a town or about polluting its pristine nature. The male cops are corrupt, too, except for Pete. Why is Pete good? Because he’s young and represents the hope that future men will be better, but only if he kills and buries his evil father and only if he submits to his Indigenous wife. Of course, Navarro’s boy toy is good for the same reason (submission) and his ethnicity.

And then there are the amazing women. Annie represents perfection, even though she’s breaking and entering and destroying private property. The ends justify the means (but only when it involves the pursuits of women—it doesn’t work that way for evil, mostly White male scientists).

Speaking of which, the cleaning ladies did nothing wrong. What’s the point of law and order? Fair trials? The police don’t care about Indigenous women, so why bother trying to use the system, ‘em I right?

No! If you look at the actual data, yes, many murders and disappearances of indigenous women do go unsolved and don’t even get investigated. But the evil White man actually has nothing to do with this. The murders and disappearances occur on autonomous Native American territory, where the evil US local governments have no jurisdiction and cannot investigate.

If you want to get real about helping indigenous women crime victims, you should put blame where blame is due: on tribal leadership.

But, that’s not here or there in this world, where the crimes committed by women are negligible and justified. It’s only men who must be punished for their transgressions.

I could go on, but I have work to do. Does that clear things up a little?

This is well put.

So what if it's woke? Or white men are portrayed as bad here. White men have had a good run as the good guy in entertainment, the stars, the ones that make the money, the ones that control the narrative, white washing all sorts of characters of color . . . . so what if that is changing?

I don't care. Not even a little. Not even at all.

[Anonymous]

oops I meant Nic Pizzolatto not Taylor Sheridan. Though to be fair they both seem as bad as each other when it comes to writing women.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I hated the ending. I’m supposed to believe that an entire group of dorky scientists killed a young woman and then a group of cleaning ladies figured it out and enacted vigilante justice? Nope. No. No. Not on your life. Issa Lopez should stick to telenovelas. Shame on you HBO. Shame! Shame!

My friends all hated it. too woke.

This is such an incomplete observation. You need to be a lot more specific if you expect someone to understand what you’re trying to say here.

DP. The wokeness is so obvious PP didn’t think it needed to be made any clearer. Since you’re being obtuse, I will spell it out for you:

Bad guys = men, mostly White ones
Good guys = women, mostly Indigenous ones

Let’s see, the scientists are bad guys, so focused on their research, they don’t care about destroying a town or about polluting its pristine nature. The male cops are corrupt, too, except for Pete. Why is Pete good? Because he’s young and represents the hope that future men will be better, but only if he kills and buries his evil father and only if he submits to his Indigenous wife. Of course, Navarro’s boy toy is good for the same reason (submission) and his ethnicity.

And then there are the amazing women. Annie represents perfection, even though she’s breaking and entering and destroying private property. The ends justify the means (but only when it involves the pursuits of women—it doesn’t work that way for evil, mostly White male scientists).

Speaking of which, the cleaning ladies did nothing wrong. What’s the point of law and order? Fair trials? The police don’t care about Indigenous women, so why bother trying to use the system, ‘em I right?

No! If you look at the actual data, yes, many murders and disappearances of indigenous women do go unsolved and don’t even get investigated. But the evil White man actually has nothing to do with this. The murders and disappearances occur on autonomous Native American territory, where the evil US local governments have no jurisdiction and cannot investigate.

If you want to get real about helping indigenous women crime victims, you should put blame where blame is due: on tribal leadership.

But, that’s not here or there in this world, where the crimes committed by women are negligible and justified. It’s only men who must be punished for their transgressions.

I could go on, but I have work to do. Does that clear things up a little?

This is well put.

So what if it's woke? Or white men are portrayed as bad here. White men have had a good run as the good guy in entertainment, the stars, the ones that make the money, the ones that control the narrative, white washing all sorts of characters of color . . . . so what if that is changing?

I don't care. Not even a little. Not even at all.

Sure, you do you. De gustibus, and I’m glad you liked it. I personally think that “woke” storytelling isn’t good for anyone including those marginalized groups that it intends to center. Where to start? To me it’s an interesting narrative choice to center a Black actress whose character is entirely unable to control her violent impulses; she’s a murderer, assaults a man on the street merely because she is upset about her sister, and apparently has zero doubt or self-awareness about any of that because she has to be portrayed as strong and a bad-ass. The intention was “woke,” I believe, but the outcome was a racist fever dream about a violent and out-of-control POC who cannot be trusted with responsibility. (Jody Foster cops out at the end, saying she would have done the same; hmm, I doubt it—but Navarro has to be let off the hook because Black characters cannot be held accountable for their violent acts in the woke world view.)

So too with the indigenous women’s posse at the end. Let’s recap: acting on a hunch, a crew of native women show up with automatic weapons to inflict collective punishment on a group of whites, some of whom may have been involved in a murder. Ok, it strains credulity in my mind, but let’s go with it. I could respect it, and would have respected it, if they had just opened up on those guys with their machine guns and taken them out. Hard core, but the native population is legitimately pissed about the mine so payback is on the table. But the show can’t have indigenous people do anything bad—not woke. So instead of giving them agency to make choices, they instead turn those guys loose onto the ice to face the judgment of whatever mystical force rules the tundra, making it painfully explicit that the men “could have made it back”. They aren’t really accountable for the deaths, it was on some spiritual force. It’s a cop-out narratively, but also plays into (racist) tropes about native Americans being closer to the spirit world and verging on holy as a result. The trope of the “magical Negro” in spades (if you pardon my little pun).

To sum up: “woke” storytelling tends to tie itself into knots in ways that lead to vastly more racist tropes than anything Pizalotto could have done on his worst day. Compare S3, which centers a Black cop, isn’t “woke” at all, and is a much better story IMO. Representation over quality is the wrong path.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well haters, the ratings were fantastic and Issa got the next season. I love that a woman told a story about the oppression of indigenous people (especially women), and the nature of trauma and grief.

This show is making me believe in conspiracy theories. Move over Julian Assange, Covid and stolen elections, I don’t believe for a split second that the ratings for this season are legitimate. They’re bots or paid for, just like the glowing reviews of this dreck. No way did more people watch this season than season 1. I remember everyone I knew watching season 1. This season, literally everyone I know stopped watching before the end. I was the only one who made it through and when I expressed my frustration with it, my friends, family and acquaintances were gobsmacked that I’d made it that far. They told me I deserved the disappointment for sticking with it all the way like an idiot.

I don’t know what’s going on but between this garbage and what Taylor Swift is doing to music, I’m starting to think that an evil cabal of globalist billionaires is trying to destroy American culture. Please someone in entertainment prove me wrong!

100% agree - with your first paragraph only though, because I like Taylor Swift.

But your remarks about this show and the bizarrely fawning reviews are spot-on. It was a horrible season and every person I know who wasted hours of their lives watching it (like me) has said as much. I actually laughed out loud when reading one of the reviews describing it as “beauty and mystical” (paraphrasing). OMG. It was like a spoof.

[Anonymous]

*beautiful and mystical

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn’t mind it. It’s a television show. Junk food for the mind. It’s not meant to be realistic or believable. It was good enough to tune in every week. They’ll never match season one and that’s ok.

True Detective went from being a high quality artistic show to low quality junk. I don’t mind watching junk, I like the Housewives series. BUT I expected high quality in writing, directing, cinematography and acting from the True Detective name. This season didn’t deliver on any of that, hence the major disappointment. The writing especially was horrible.

It’s like buying a Chanel bag at an high end department store and finding out it’s a fake you could have purchased in Chinatown. I would be livid if I were Nic Pizzolatto. Hell, I’m livid as just a spectator.

Precisely. Junk TV has its place, for sure. But True Detective isn’t supposed to be junk, and this season was.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess I'm the only one who actually liked this season! It had its flaws, yes - but every week I enjoyed watching it.

Same.

This review section reminds me of yelp. People just like to hear themselves type.

Or, you know - people have different opinions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ugh, I hated the ending. I’m supposed to believe that an entire group of dorky scientists killed a young woman and then a group of cleaning ladies figured it out and enacted vigilante justice? Nope. No. No. Not on your life. Issa Lopez should stick to telenovelas. Shame on you HBO. Shame! Shame!

My friends all hated it. too woke.

This is such an incomplete observation. You need to be a lot more specific if you expect someone to understand what you’re trying to say here.

DP. The wokeness is so obvious PP didn’t think it needed to be made any clearer. Since you’re being obtuse, I will spell it out for you:

Bad guys = men, mostly White ones
Good guys = women, mostly Indigenous ones

Let’s see, the scientists are bad guys, so focused on their research, they don’t care about destroying a town or about polluting its pristine nature. The male cops are corrupt, too, except for Pete. Why is Pete good? Because he’s young and represents the hope that future men will be better, but only if he kills and buries his evil father and only if he submits to his Indigenous wife. Of course, Navarro’s boy toy is good for the same reason (submission) and his ethnicity.

And then there are the amazing women. Annie represents perfection, even though she’s breaking and entering and destroying private property. The ends justify the means (but only when it involves the pursuits of women—it doesn’t work that way for evil, mostly White male scientists).

Speaking of which, the cleaning ladies did nothing wrong. What’s the point of law and order? Fair trials? The police don’t care about Indigenous women, so why bother trying to use the system, ‘em I right?

No! If you look at the actual data, yes, many murders and disappearances of indigenous women do go unsolved and don’t even get investigated. But the evil White man actually has nothing to do with this. The murders and disappearances occur on autonomous Native American territory, where the evil US local governments have no jurisdiction and cannot investigate.

If you want to get real about helping indigenous women crime victims, you should put blame where blame is due: on tribal leadership.

But, that’s not here or there in this world, where the crimes committed by women are negligible and justified. It’s only men who must be punished for their transgressions.

I could go on, but I have work to do. Does that clear things up a little?

This is well put.

So what if it's woke? Or white men are portrayed as bad here. White men have had a good run as the good guy in entertainment, the stars, the ones that make the money, the ones that control the narrative, white washing all sorts of characters of color . . . . so what if that is changing?

I don't care. Not even a little. Not even at all.

Sure, you do you. De gustibus, and I’m glad you liked it. I personally think that “woke” storytelling isn’t good for anyone including those marginalized groups that it intends to center. Where to start? To me it’s an interesting narrative choice to center a Black actress whose character is entirely unable to control her violent impulses; she’s a murderer, assaults a man on the street merely because she is upset about her sister, and apparently has zero doubt or self-awareness about any of that because she has to be portrayed as strong and a bad-ass. The intention was “woke,” I believe, but the outcome was a racist fever dream about a violent and out-of-control POC who cannot be trusted with responsibility. (Jody Foster cops out at the end, saying she would have done the same; hmm, I doubt it—but Navarro has to be let off the hook because Black characters cannot be held accountable for their violent acts in the woke world view.)

So too with the indigenous women’s posse at the end. Let’s recap: acting on a hunch, a crew of native women show up with automatic weapons to inflict collective punishment on a group of whites, some of whom may have been involved in a murder. Ok, it strains credulity in my mind, but let’s go with it. I could respect it, and would have respected it, if they had just opened up on those guys with their machine guns and taken them out. Hard core, but the native population is legitimately pissed about the mine so payback is on the table. But the show can’t have indigenous people do anything bad—not woke. So instead of giving them agency to make choices, they instead turn those guys loose onto the ice to face the judgment of whatever mystical force rules the tundra, making it painfully explicit that the men “could have made it back”. They aren’t really accountable for the deaths, it was on some spiritual force. It’s a cop-out narratively, but also plays into (racist) tropes about native Americans being closer to the spirit world and verging on holy as a result. The trope of the “magical Negro” in spades (if you pardon my little pun).

To sum up: “woke” storytelling tends to tie itself into knots in ways that lead to vastly more racist tropes than anything Pizalotto could have done on his worst day. Compare S3, which centers a Black cop, isn’t “woke” at all, and is a much better story IMO. Representation over quality is the wrong path.

Great post!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn’t mind it. It’s a television show. Junk food for the mind. It’s not meant to be realistic or believable. It was good enough to tune in every week. They’ll never match season one and that’s ok.

True Detective went from being a high quality artistic show to low quality junk. I don’t mind watching junk, I like the Housewives series. BUT I expected high quality in writing, directing, cinematography and acting from the True Detective name. This season didn’t deliver on any of that, hence the major disappointment. The writing especially was horrible.

It’s like buying a Chanel bag at an high end department store and finding out it’s a fake you could have purchased in Chinatown. I would be livid if I were Nic Pizzolatto. Hell, I’m livid as just a spectator.

Yeah honey, you’re definitely overthinking it. And it was not that bad

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess I'm the only one who actually liked this season! It had its flaws, yes - but every week I enjoyed watching it.

Same.

This review section reminds me of yelp. People just like to hear themselves type.

Or, you know - people have different opinions.

To be honest, yours was the shortest one here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I didn’t mind it. It’s a television show. Junk food for the mind. It’s not meant to be realistic or believable. It was good enough to tune in every week. They’ll never match season one and that’s ok.

True Detective went from being a high quality artistic show to low quality junk. I don’t mind watching junk, I like the Housewives series. BUT I expected high quality in writing, directing, cinematography and acting from the True Detective name. This season didn’t deliver on any of that, hence the major disappointment. The writing especially was horrible.

It’s like buying a Chanel bag at an high end department store and finding out it’s a fake you could have purchased in Chinatown. I would be livid if I were Nic Pizzolatto. Hell, I’m livid as just a spectator.

Precisely. Junk TV has its place, for sure. But True Detective isn’t supposed to be junk, and this season was.

That’s like your opinion, man.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well haters, the ratings were fantastic and Issa got the next season. I love that a woman told a story about the oppression of indigenous people (especially women), and the nature of trauma and grief.

To me Lopez painted women and indigenous people as irrational, incompetent, and impulsive
-Both female lead detectives were terrible at their jobs. Couldn't figure out that a dozen random cleaning ladies stormed the station on initial investigation. Couldn't figure out the caves were under the station when they had a map. Killed or attacked the domestic violence guys in the only other cases we saw them investigate. Let the cleaning ladies go. Encouraged the coverup of the elder Prior's death
-Cop and her sister commit suicide because they see ghosts. To me it is insulting to portray that suicide is a noble death for the indigenous women and they did it twice!
-Cleaning ladies find a drill bit six years after the fact and decide storming the station and killing the ALL the scientists is the way to go without any evidence which scientists actually killed Annie

The most redeeming characters were the young male cop (killed his dad), Rose (disposed of bodies) and the bar guy.

I think you're misunderstanding the native cleaning women. They found the drill bit and began to surmise that the scientists killed Annie, but then investigated around the station to try to figure out why. We saw them opening up the file cabinets etc and looking at the research. So they came to understand that the scientists had not just killed Annie, but that the mine was responsible for polluting the area and effectively killing residents. So they engaged in some frontier justice, as many before have done. You seem to find this bad writing, but this kind of thing was the basis of a lot of very macho Clint Eastwood movies so I'm not sure what you're complaining about really, should be right up your alley.

I enjoyed the first season more -- it was creepier and the way the leads played off one another was more entertaining to me -- some of the scenes where Harrelson is just begging for McCaunaghy not to say anything weird for two minutes still make me laugh years later. But I thought the mystery this season was a pretty good tbh, and I enjoyed that the mystery of Annie's death was actually "solved" by an unexpected, marginalized, discounted group rather than the law enforcement people usually at the center of this show.