A teaser trailer for the long-gestating third season of HBO’s crime anthology series “True Detective” dropped after Sunday’s night’s brutal conclusion of “Sharp Objects” — and it’s anything but surprising.
The show seems to have tripled-down on the elements that earned it both praise and derision: a famous movie star in the lead, unrelentingly dark atmosphere and pseudo-intellectual, dialectic mutterings.
To wit: The new season, dropping in January, stars Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali as beleaguered detective Wayne Hays. The plot follows “the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks, and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods.” Finally, throughout the trailer, Ali’s character says things such as, “My whole brain’s a bunch of missing pieces” and “This peace is more haunting than anything.”
The teaser, with its washed-out, beige-gray color palette, isn’t only reminiscent of previous installments of “True Detective.” Its final seconds, which feature snapshots of things like automatic weapons in car trunks, people hitting each other, cutout magazine letters arranged in a threatening message and a small (seemingly impoverished)child waving morosely at the camera, all bring to mind another show also set in the area: Netflix’s excellent, breakneck-paced “Ozark,” which returns for a second season Friday.
“True Detective” creator Nic Pizzolatto again helmed the writing, which should instill some fans with excitement and others with dread. The reception of the series, after all, has been a bit of a roller coaster.
The first season of “True Detective,” starring Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan and Alexandra Daddario, burst onto the prestige television scene like a racehorse out of the gate in 2014. The show, about two police officers hunting a potential serial killer in rural Louisiana, looked and felt like nothing else on television.
As the story began hinting that it might contain a mystical or supernatural element, it captured the imaginations of legions of internet sleuths who filled message boards with theory after theory on the identity of “The Yellow King” and what, exactly, “Carcosa” was. Suddenly, HBO fans were pouring through the works of Robert W. Chambers — a 19th century writer who trafficked in the supernatural and whose work many thought the season was based upon. Meanwhile, the psycho-philosophical ramblings of McConaughey’s Det. Rust Cohle were dissected ad nauseam.
As the season passed its midpoint, the Atlantic boldly declared it “The Best Show on TV.” After the finale, the magazine published a piece titled, “The ‘True Detective’ Finale: That’s It?”
The theory that it was Fukunaga’s direction, not Pizzolatto’s writing, elevating the show become commonly believed. The show’s second season only strengthened it.
The second season was generally considered a failure. Where the first scored an 86 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the second garnered a middling 63 percent.
