|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
124
Mixed:
40
Negative:
1
|
Critic Reviews
Jan 12, 2024
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).
Read full review
Jan 10, 2019
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 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, 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.
Read full review
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.
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 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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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
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.
Read full review
Jan 7, 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
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 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
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 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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Jun 19, 2015
TV Guide MagazineJun 18, 2015
Season 2 Review:
True Detective has its moments as a character study. [22-28 Jun 2015, p.10]
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
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.
Read full review
Jun 12, 2015
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
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.
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:
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
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, 2014
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score