True Detective

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.

There is something still lugubrious and overwrought about True Detective, but there’s also a mesmerizing style to it--it’s imperfect, but well made.

The sharpness of Season One gives way to the moodiness of Season Two. And, thus far (three episodes were made available), it’s hard to get a bead on where this is headed.

Even though it’s been a heady year since the first thrilling installment and the season runs but eight episodes, something feels undercooked about this production.

The overriding problem with True Detective 2 is its neck-deep wallow in debasement and self-pity.

True Deetective is both underwritten and over-plotted.

The second season's central mystery is enough to keep you watching, but you can say the same thing about Law & Order. The ordinariness is a quality that weighs heavily on True Detective because its cop-show genre is all over TV.

Whatever the reason, or the combination of reasons, the second season of True Detective drags disappointingly along as wearisome second-tier stuff. That doesn't mean it's without merit. It doesn't mean there aren't dazzlingly surprising stretches.

There's an intermittently engaging trashiness to this season of True Detective, but the overall production feels overbearingly self-serious, though not in any self-aware way that would excuse the entire death-drunk schematics Pizzolatto has designed here.

It's an okay cop drama, to be sure, but it's definitely a cop drama you have seen many, many times before.

True Detective has its moments as a character study. [22-28 Jun 2015, p.10]

Three episodes in, the murder mystery is fairly intriguing, but the characters are not. And while improvement is always possible, that's a hard flaw to fix, in a show that (for now) counts as a miss.

Season 2 loses the novelty of the show’s first outing and highlights the weaknesses.

[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.

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.

True Detective is trying so hard here it hurts. ... Pizzolatto has inexplicably made every character in this season spout clipped and elliptical phrases. They begin to pile up so quickly that you soon realize there’s no flow to the characters, no realism to them.

Although generally watchable, the inspiration that turned the first [season] into an obsession for many seems to have drained out of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s prose.

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.

The new season’s more-is-more approach feels forced. Even the pretentiousness seems turned up a notch.