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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
124
Mixed:
40
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Jan 12, 2024
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 10, 2019
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 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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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 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 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
As brilliant as many of the storytelling flourishes are, the narrative frequently suffers from awkward construction, clumsily bouncing among three time periods.... It's a brainy drama, to be sure, and it's a challenging one. The riveting lead performances are what keep you engaged when the going gets static--something more than engaged, actually.
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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 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 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 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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Jun 17, 2015
Season 2 Review:
These are all excellent actors, most of them trying to push themselves out of their comfort zone in the same way McConaughey and Harrelson did, but with more mixed results.... The second season has [Pizzolatto] at times contorting himself into doing things that don't play as well to his strengths, and at others cranking up his specialties.
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Jan 7, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The two central performances are so powerful, the dialogue so evocative, the look so intense, that they speak to the value of the hybrid anthology format Pizzolatto is using here--which, along with FX’s “American Horror Story,” points to a potentially fascinating shift in dramatic series television.
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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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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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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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Jan 13, 2014
Season 1 Review:
After True Detective, all the other TV cops hunting serial killers are going to look like copycats. It’s that the taut script and spot-on dialogue takes us on a ’90s noir roller coaster ride of Shakespearean tragedy with fearless literary aspirations, delivered by two actors at the top of their game.
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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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Jan 16, 2024Jan 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, 2014
Season 1 Review:
True Detective runs slow and steady without ever seeming to drag. Even minor characters get room to breathe, and seem independently alive; the briefest scenes seem to imply life beyond the frame.... The dance [Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson] do together here is work of a very high order, and all the reason you need to watch.
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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 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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Jun 12, 2015
Season 2 Review:
You’ll probably miss the humor of the first True Detective but the brooding sourness of this one is fascinating in a different way, though it loses points for showing us a world that feels far more familiar than the one showcased in season one. When Ani, Ray, and Paul are drawn together as a unit, it takes a while to establish any kind of chemistry between them, because they’re all variations of the Mann-style, soul-sick badass.
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Jan 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The first four episodes sent out for review become stranger and less “realistic” by the hour, not to mention more stereotypically HBO-like (artfully arranged corpses; drug-thug posturing and handgun-waving; gratuitous T&A) and less concerned with the case that Cohle and Hart are allegedly trying to solve. But the show’s time-shifting structure is so painstaking that even when True Detective spirals into lurid madness there still seems to be purpose behind it.
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Jan 7, 2014
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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Jan 8, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The real pleasure of this series is watching them peel away the layers to this particular onion, often on long car drives across a vast, wet, undifferentiated Louisiana landscape.... The real problem with True Detective are those flash-forwards to the present day: Younger Cohle, at least, is interesting. The older version is gaseous and his maunderings often stop the show cold.
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Jan 10, 2014
Season 1 Review:
Very little happens in the first three hours of this anthology crime series, yet it's absolutely riveting. [20 Jan 2014]
Radio 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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RogerEbert.comFeb 20, 2014
Season 1 Review:
HBO's program is not just an actor's showcase for two greats. It is dense, complex, rewarding storytelling, heightened by a sense of location from its writer and director that is mesmerizing and a character-driven storytelling aesthetic that brings to mind great films like David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Bong Joon-ho's "Memories of Murder."
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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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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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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 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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Jun 12, 2015
Season 2 Review:
On paper, the set-up and the plot may seem workable, but in reality, the characters are both over-written and under-thought. The writers seem to have gone overboard finding layers and layers of trumped up psychology to make the characters more interesting. In so doing, they’ve also made them less credible.
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Jan 9, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The dialogue is rich, colorful and provocative, adding to the gothic sensibilities of the series. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga makes great use of the Louisiana location, giving it as much importance to the story as the characters of Cohle and Hart. All the performances are superb, but those of McConaughey and Harrelson are in a class by themselves.
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Jun 18, 2015
Season 2 Review:
All of the lead actors dig deeply into their roles, with Farrell playing the wary, weary burnout to perfection, and Vaughn shifting into full-throttle intensity. The story is dark and atmospheric--just the way fans like it. Meanwhile, the first three episodes hint at enough buried secrets and fresh angles to indicate that the story still has a lot to give.
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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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Jun 19, 2015Jan 8, 2014
Season 1 Review:
At its wildest moments, the series feels as frighteningly nervy and furious in its delivery and intent as prime David Lynch. More times than not, however, it defers to an earnest, rote view of bad religion, only marginally enlivened by the appearance of Shea Whigham as a big-tent preacher.
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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 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 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 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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Jun 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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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 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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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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