|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
124
Mixed:
40
Negative:
1
|
Critic Reviews
Jun 19, 2015
Season 2 Review:
Just about everything that made the first season of True Detective entrancing is missing from the second, wholly re-imagined second season. In truth, only the worst, most clichéd parts remain. And yet.... If you make it to the third episode, chances are you'll keep going.
Read full review
The GuardianJan 16, 2024
Season 4 Review:
López has kept the off-kilter essence of the thing but made it – with the help of Foster, Reis and an array of other fine actors, including Fiona Shaw and Christopher Eccleston – its own thing. She has created a brooding, melancholy world of terrible possibilities and made True Detective not just worth watching again but more so than ever.
Read full review
The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 3 Review:
In the end, this is a decent, serviceable thriller, nasty enough to give the impression of not flinching away from the darkest natures of its characters, and sufficiently gripping to ensure that viewers should keep on watching, to find out who they fingered for the crimes of 1980, and why this particular case returns to haunt Hays, decades on, like so many TV detectives before him.
Read full review
Jan 2, 2024
Season 4 Review:
A female-forward story that personalizes and internalizes the anthology’s typically convoluted plotting in a way that’s refreshing and frequently potent. But as the first True Detective season not to tell its story over eight episodes, Night Country comes off as needlessly truncated in key areas, lacking the opportunity to truly inhabit its most distinctive elements.
Read full review
Jan 2, 2019
Season 3 Review:
True Detective arrives for a third installment seeming to have already established its peaks and valleys. As a vehicle for actors and mood, few shows are better, and with Ali front and center, the new season is easy to get interested in, despite a lackluster mystery that may make it a struggle to stay interested.
Read full review
Jun 12, 2015Jan 2, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The acting--by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson--is off the charts. The writing and the concept, by series creator and novelist Nic Pizzolatto, undulates from effectively brash soliloquies to penetratingly nuanced moments carried by sparse prose. Lastly, director Cary Joji Fukunaga has created a beautiful, sprawling sense of place (the series is shot and set in Louisiana).
Read full review
Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The mystery steadily dissolves into preposterousness, the characters sink into incoherence, and the horror isn’t original or evocative enough to carry things on its own. .... Foster, against all odds, finds ways to make Danvers seem human and even uncovers glints of humor in her; how she does it is a bigger mystery than those men in the ice.
Read full review
Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
If you score “True Detective” Season 3 on originality, it fails--for repeating both its own history and the already-dated cable genre of glum loners confronting the evils men do. But if you treat it as a do-over--if the series, like one of its haunted antiheroes, is retracing its steps to try to get things right--then it’s fine. Often quite good. Far more consistent.
Read full review
Jan 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The flashback structure, which could have been cumbersome and distracting, is impressively seamless. But, despite these positives, things start to go off track as early as the second episode.... [Director Cary Joji Fukunaga] doesn’t show much ability here to animate Mr. Pizzolatto’s dialogue-heavy encounters.... There are some nice moments in the later episodes, and they’re the ones with the fewest words.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The new “True Detective” is faintly pretentious, manageably ridiculous, and dull. ... Throughout his terrific performance as this emotionally wounded warrior, Ali steams and simmers and smolders with repressed emotion. The display of heat is all the more remarkable because the script sheds little light on Hays’s inner self.
Read full review
Mar 27, 2014The Observer (UK)Sep 10, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Whether you deem Night Country a successful reboot of a spiralling franchise will depend on your interest in spirituality (never too far from the True Detective hinterland, but the supernatural is more explicit here) and how forgiving you are in the face of subpar special effects.
Read full review
The PlaylistJan 2, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Not quite horror, but spinetingling, not quite straightforward thriller, but still gripping, and leveraging elements of mystery and police procedural with relatably messy humans at its center, filmmaker Issa López has carefully crafted a modern-day crime classic that rivals “True Detective” season one in its addictive, enthralling qualities.
Read full review
The TelegraphJan 2, 2024
Season 4 Review:
It is The Wire’s Baltimore or True Blood’s Louisiana. By episode six, a bravura, nerve-shredding conclusion that stands shoulder-square with some of the best hours of TV of recent years, the Night Country will be somewhere you’ll never want to go back to – but somewhere you’ll never forget.
Read full review
The TimesJan 16, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The plot is unforgettable, even if the ultimate, gobsmacking denouement may test your credulity. Foster is a contained hurricane as the beady, brittle Liz Danvers, and is close to the show-stopping form she was on playing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. She has been paired brilliantly with Kali Reis.
Read full review
The TimesJan 7, 2020
Season 3 Review:
This is often a one-man show for Ali, sometimes wearing prosthetics to make him old, grey and suffering from dementia, and he is terrific in all three timelines. Great performances too from the missing children's dysfunctional, barneying parents. ... It's not yet as good as series one but there are rich, tragic seams here.
Read full review
Jan 9, 2014
Season 1 Review:
Often True Detective is too much about the performances–there’s something very actorly about it, setting up McConaughey in particular with set pieces and monologues that, while exquisitely written on the page and probably potent Emmy-bait, would be twice as effective if there were half as many.
Read full review
Jan 2, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Just like Nas could never make another Illmatic, Nic Pizzolatto can never make another Season 1. You only get one divinely inspired first impression. But Nas made Stillmatic and has had a long, solid career. And that's what's happening here. True Detective is pivoting to reliability. It's no longer trying to be a sensation. It's just trying to be a good show.
Read full review
TV Guide MagazineJan 25, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Riveting and eerie. [29 Jan - 18 Feb 2024, p.7]
TV Guide MagazineJan 3, 2019
Season 3 Review:
[Nic Pizzolatto] puts story and character first in this long-awaited comeback season. ... Even when the script takes heady philosophical detours into poetry and Einstein, it never loses sight of the toll of the investigation takes on those charged with solving the case. [7-20 Jan 2019, p.10]
TV Guide MagazineJun 18, 2015
Season 2 Review:
True Detective has its moments as a character study. [22-28 Jun 2015, p.10]
TV Guide MagazineJan 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The crime they're investigating often takes such a back seat to the show's tricky structure and the all-pervasive angst you may once again wonder what exactly HBO has against the notion of narrative urgency. But be patient with this slow-burner of a disturbing, demanding drama. These detectives are truly fascinating.
Read full review
Jan 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
"Night Country" runs without sprinting; every episode is taut, focused and excruciatingly enthralling. The season is a tight six episodes, and no scene feels extraneous or too short. It leaves you wanting, then satisfies you with a finale that answers much but not all.
Read full review
Jan 12, 2024
Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Both the roles and performances [by Jodie Foster and boxer-turned-actor Kali Reis] complement one another, giving “True Detective” two true, evenly matched co-leads for the first time since Harrelson and McConaughey. .... In redefining what the show can be, “Night Country” also invigorates the archetype by placing it in a fresh context.
Read full review
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 9, 2014
Jan 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
I finished “True Detective: Night Country” feeling frustrated as well as moved. This was a season with good bones (pun intended) that needed more than six episodes to breathe. Absent that space, it leans on so much shorthand that the setup starts to feel hand-wavy and a little, well, generic.
Read full review
Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Ponderous. ... What’s more remarkable is how Ali elevates the material without much help from the scripts. ... The lack of imagination extends to the female characters. ... [Nic Pizzolotto’s] show struggles to find its sweet spot as a work of television, maybe because it’s conceived with a pace and style that is better suited to the page.
Read full review
Jun 18, 2015
Season 2 Review:
[Nic Pizzolatto's] chosen the hardboiled-detective genre as his main menu, and given us three eggs so overdone, you couldn’t even stick a fork in them.... Each of the lead actors is doing superb work: Farrell, McAdams, and Kitsch find distinctive ways of expressing their troubled pasts and difficult present-day situations.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score