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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
124
Mixed:
40
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
The 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.
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LooperApr 1, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Atmospheric, intense, and driven by a ferocious desire to do something new while never letting go of what made the series work in the first place, "True Detective: Night Country" is an absolute stunner, and proof that the show's emphasis on new blood has paid off in a big way.
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TV Guide MagazineJan 25, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Riveting and eerie. [29 Jan - 18 Feb 2024, p.7]
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.
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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.
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Jan 16, 2024Radio TimesJan 16, 2024
Season 4 Review:
True Detective: Night Country episode 1 is an excellent hour of television, giving HBO's ailing detective franchise a whole new lease of life. We can't say much about the remaining five episodes, but let us assure you that there's no dip in quality – this bold reinvention continues to stun right up until the final scene.
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
True Detective: Night Country is the best season of the series since the original. The horror sequences are especially good, and creator Issa López thoughtfully engages with the Alaska location without sacrificing the intrigue of a good detective story. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis make a formidable duo.
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
At the risk of making more work for already overloaded TV viewers, it’s worth noting that Night Country benefits from a second viewing, especially since the “who” in the “whodunnit” will almost certainly come as a surprise. (No spoilers, but the reveal is viscerally satisfying.)
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
A fourth season of True Detective, appearing a decade after its sweaty, broody, macho debut, calls not for a return to form but for an overhaul—which is exactly what the stylish and eerie True Detective: Night Country, premiering on HBO on Sunday, succeeds at being.
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
This balance is tricky to strike: gesturing at your intent to forge a new direction while heavily invoking what came before you. And although the show is not quite a “return to form,” it’s a nice bit of Sunday-night programming that scratches the itch for a gripping detective story.
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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.
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
What López achieves is a reconfiguring of this franchise’s titular protagonist into a figure not turning its back on the void and declaring victory, but peering over the edge at an eternal miasma, with the sobering knowledge that the subterranean world is reaching ever upward to pull us back into its depths.
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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.
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Jan 12, 2024
Season 4 Review:
At times there’s so much going on that the series almost loses its way — but then there’s another great jump-scare or an intricately staged set piece in the abandoned lab or beneath the ice, and we’re all in. Foster keeps peeling back layers to reveal different sides of Danvers, while relative newcomer Reis proves to be a formidable acting partner.
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Jan 12, 2024
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.
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Jan 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The season has a forward drive that grabs you and pulls you through all kinds of heavy twists, ominous clues bordering on the supernatural, and bleak horizons, to the point where I ended up wanting more than the season’s six episodes. .... Foster is remarkable here, in ways that remind me of Kate Winslet’s turn in “Mare of Easttown.” It’s one of her most natural and charismatic performances. .... Reis is a great partner for Foster, and a revelation as an actor.
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Jan 11, 2024
Season 4 Review:
There’s a compelling story buried in here, about the town’s indigenous Iñupiaq women, and how and why they operate on the margins. “True Detective” mostly keeps them on the edges of the story, as well. The finale suggests a more interesting story that could have been front and center.
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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.
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IndieWireJan 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Season 4’s real accomplishment is in growing beyond its origins to craft a slyly subversive crime show that’s fraught, finespun, and refreshing. It helps prove that dark-and-gritty murder-mysteries don’t have to be drenched in masculinity, let alone misogyny (intentional or otherwise), to scratch the same itch for amateur sleuths at home.
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SlashfilmJan 5, 2024
Season 4 Review:
There are moments this season that choked me up emotionally in a way no previous season of "True Detective" has before, resulting in a rich, rewarding experience. If you were left disappointed by seasons 2 and 3, have faith — "True Detective" is back and better than ever.
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Jan 3, 2024
Season 4 Review:
True Detective: Night Country doesn’t ever quite hit the smarmy noir notes Pizzolatto’s seasons were known for, but it’s crisp, chilling fun. Foster is fantastic, Reis a revelation, and López an auteur on the rise. It’s a dark and twisty thriller that’s perfect for these cold winter Sunday nights and even better for dissecting Monday morning with friends.
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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.
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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.
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Jan 2, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Was it worth resurrecting the long-dormant True Detective franchise — and without its original creator, Nic Pizzolatto? The new season, created, directed, and largely written by Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid), and starring Jodie Foster, answers with a resounding, “Hell, yes.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Feb 1, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The fiery and intense performances; Pizzolatto’s dense and rich writing; the finely calibrated directing from Jeremy Saulnier; the superb editing; the chilling and mournful music from the great T. Bone Burnett; the cinematography that changes hues to reflect the various time periods--all of these elements contribute to a slightly intoxicating case of Viewer Vertigo, as we try to maintain our balance while constantly being thrown OFF balance. ... This is addictive television.
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Jan 14, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The plot’s framework may be a retread, but those who kept the faith through the three-and-a-half year gap between the disastrous season 2 and this new story may be heartened by its intentional recall to the McConaughey-Harrelson chapter. If this is Pizzolatto asking for a do-over, Ali’s smolder lends the writer enough currency to buy at least a few hours of patience. But from there it’s hard to definitively characterize this season as more of a success that the season it resembles most.
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Jan 14, 2019
Season 3 Review:
True Detective Season 3 is a little more workmanlike and less baroque, perhaps too eager to prove that it can tell a legible story again. But it’s anchored by Ali’s terrific work in the lead role--a little more restrained than stars past, though just as captivating.
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Jan 11, 2019
Season 3 Review:
Ali sculpts a full, tragic figure in a relatively short amount of time and from a fairly limited amount of raw material. Even as the story’s focal point, Wayne is underwritten, a character more notable for the way he’s played and the extraordinary circumstances he finds himself in than for, say, his past as an army tracker or his off-duty boar-hunting hobby. The lack of personality pervades the scripts.
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Jan 11, 2019
Season 3 Review:
If you subscribe to the opinion that the original True Detective was terrific and the second edition, well, wasn't, the third marks a bracing case of going back to the future. That's because this latest season largely mirrors the first, unspooling a mystery across three distinct time frames while receiving an enormous star-power boost courtesy of Mahershala Ali.
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Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The initially welcome focus on Hays, however, continues much longer than the character--or even Ali’s nuanced performance--can ultimately sustain. Large swaths of the season drag as a result, seemingly begging for a more engaging mystery or some other character to latch onto in an equal capacity, or even the pulpy excess of True Detective‘s second season.
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Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
It's an ambitious and imperfect work, beautiful and corny, believable and less believable by turns. I recommend it, with advisories. ... What's most compelling, and touching, in True Detective are these elements of memory and time, how it moves on and stands still. Ali, especially, with the help of some crack makeup and hair people, is persuasive as Wayne across a span of 35 years, living in the present and in an incomplete past that is running away from him even as he runs toward it.
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Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
It’s a time-shifting saga about an emotionally disturbed person trying to solve the disappearance of children in a rural area, a tale told mere months ago on this same cable channel, in a dazzling adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. But there’s still plenty to like, starting with the way Pizzolatto and Deadwood creator David Milch (who was a consultant and co-wrote an episode) have decided to focus not on a mismatched buddy-cop team, but on a single protagonist, Arkansas detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali).
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Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The new season has some of this same incomprehensibility [of season 1 and 2], but a relatively small amount. Everything about it is toned down. The creepy totems left at the scene of the crime seem like a willful echo of the first season’s tangles of twigs, but without their eerie power. Ali is excellent as Hays.
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Jan 10, 2019Jan 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.
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Jan 10, 2019
Season 3 Review:
This season is more season one True Detective than season two True Detective, with Ali giving a tour de force performance as the show toggles between three time periods. The bad news? The central mystery is more fitting for a CBS crime procedural, and over eight episodes is stretched to its limit.
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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.
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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.
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Jan 4, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The third season of Nick Pizzolatto’s anthology series swings back like a pendulum, losing the absurdity of the second season for an approach that’s considerably more staid. ... But season three powers through with wonderfully dense visuals, a layered story and an absolute powerhouse performance by Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali, who portrays brooding Detective Wayne Hays in three time periods.
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Jan 3, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The many echoes of that original story are at first reassuring, as if lessons were learned from the Farrell/Vaughn mess. But in time, Ali’s performance is the only thing disguising how rote this all feels, and how much the series keeps repeating itself, within seasons as well as across them. There are periodic moments that pulse with life--or, at least, that feel like clichés done right. And then there are others where it all feels like antihero-drama karaoke in an era when TV has mostly moved away from these overused tropes.
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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]
Jan 2, 2019
Season 3 Review:
The new somber mystery will satisfy fans seeking the old True Detective high, and the Ozarks setting will surely please your cousin who loves Ozark. The acting is very strong. ... But Saulnier departs the series after the second hour. And the episodes that follow (I’ve seen through the fifth) feel repetitive, dreary, self-serious if not just mopey.
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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.
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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.
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Jan 2, 2019
Jun 22, 2015
Season 2 Review:
Although it was wise not to try to repeat the double interrogation format of the first season, there are clever nods to those closed-room confessionals, and the show eventually eases into rewarding drive-and-talks between Farrell and McAdams.... What keeps this Detective from being quite as compelling as the first is the lack of early focus.
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Jun 19, 2015
Season 2 Review:
There's a lot of backstory, and there's a lot of plot that makes the first couple of episodes a bit difficult to ease into, but at the end of the second episode, Pizzolato's penchant for abrupt violence with a side of freakiness will leave you with panting for more.
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The Daily BeastJun 19, 2015
Season 2 Review:
Season 2 of HBO's True Detective is almost entirely devoid of the lyrical dialogue, nonlinear storytelling, and treasure trove of literary references that crashed servers and launched a thousand subreddits (for the former, you’ll have to turn to the Lincoln commercials). It’s a straightforward pulpy neo-noir.... The performances are all top-notch and the pacing is brisk.
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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.
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Jun 19, 2015Jun 18, 2015
Season 2 Review:
The result is monotony. Season one spiced up its mood with a pungent mix of buddy-cop comedy, surreal horror, and mystery. Season two is serious people doing serious things all the time. None of these characters have ever found anything funny in their lives, and none of them have anything interesting to offer one another (or us) beyond solving the case.
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