True Detective

Ali is impressive in all three life stages, but his performance as the haunted and addled 70-year-old Hays has the most resonance.

The superbly written first chapter signals the horror to come in haunting detail. ... This is a script determinedly dedicated to the slow reveal. But it also one alive with passion and a mordant wit. ... A subtle and affecting portrayal by Mr. Ali.

[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]

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.

This was redneck noir: Twin Peaks meets Broadchurch, with a dash of The Killing. Atmospheric and beguiling, True Detective had its hooks into me again.

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.

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.

[Mahershala Ali's] take on Hays enhances rather than overwhelms a story intriguing enough to justify the show’s 35-year timeline.

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.

Through it all, Ali is a marvel. Even when the dialogue lets him down, Ali imbues Hays with pride, tamped-down anger, sadness and so much humanity he makes True Detective something special.

The five episodes I have seen take the best stuff about True Detective and finally wed it to a story that proceeds in a mostly satisfying fashion.

Tightly directed (in its first episodes by Jeremy Saulnier) and plotted, and with a performance at its center that steers away from calling attention to itself, the new “True Detective” transcends hype and amounts to 2019’s first pleasant small-screen surprise.

It may not be as arresting or iconic as the first season, but time is a flat circle. True Detective has come back around with a true return to form.

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.

A solid third season whose structure and style hew close to those of the first.

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.

The first five episodes are stirring entertainment, steadying a very rocky boat and teasing an end that feels far more likely to exceed expectations than spoil a strong setup.

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).

[Mahershala Ali's] performance gives the season its unifying theme, and at times the case is most compelling for the ways it intersects with his life. Despite the shadowy distractions, True Detective is a solid procedural led by a faceted leading performance.

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.

[The third season] has much more in common structurally and tonally with the first season but still can’t quite compare with that year or the best of current television it so wishes to join.

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.

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.

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.

It’s safe to say that Season 3 improves on that mess [Vince Vaughn’s Season 2 performance], but it still registers as a mild disappointment, all things considered.

A thin story spread over a lot of hours, but Ali is excellent and so is his support.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.