7:35 I’m glad you mentioned how two-dimensional all of the characters felt. They didn’t feel like people. They felt like they were checkmarks on a list.
got the same feeling about a lot of things in this show, that it was just a checklist exercise. like each scene has to have either a bear, a spiral or an orange. there needs to be 1 person pointing like a zombie or saying "shes awake". every second scene needs to have danvers saying "youre not asking the right question"
I condone Nic taking the piss out of the new season. I think creators should derided their stuff being handed off by corporate suits to be dragged through the mud and turned into utter shit that’s out of their control.
@@ryanrich06 isn’t Chris super duper polite anymore and unwilling to say anything negative cause he wants to enter the industry now? Also TD s4 sucks really bad. Cry about it I guess?
I had to go back a re-watch season 1 to cleanse my pallet after STRUGGLING to get through season 4. The first season had such a dark, chilling, realistic feeling to it. This season feels like it tried so hard to be that, and it just completely missed the mark in every single facet. I've never been so frustratingly fascinated at such a departure in quality from such a ground breaking show.
I mean... season 2 was already a departure in quality. I'm confused as to why people are accusing Lopez of "ruining True Detective" when really, Pizzolato did it all on his own is season two. I never watch season 3, so I don't know if it pick up again there or if it's just as bad as 2. Not saying 4 was better than 2, but I didn't think it was worst either.
Also, I think the episode in the first season where Rust and Marty are going back and forth telling the cover-up story about what went down when they murdered those two child traffickers is a god damn cinematic work of art IMO.
especially the part where marty says "i will tell it the same way i've told it since, because its the only way it happened" and it cuts to the flashback where the events are immediately shown as different than he says lmao
I feel that True Detective never existed after Season 1. Nic Pizzolatto had an awesome southern gothic story to tell, growing up in the setting of Louisiana. The later anthology seasons feel like stories trying to chase that same theme of the first season, which doesn't fit so well in other settings. I do like aspects of the later seasons, but I feel Nic didn't plan for future titles under the same title.
my unpopular opinion is that matthew mcconaughey is at least 85% of the reason why season 1 is the masterpiece that it is. sure, the writing is good, but HIS rust cohle is the heart of the story. i can't imagine it having the success it has if you change the actor for rustin. edit: this is why nic p couldn't replicate the success of the first season even though he wrote seasons 2 & 3. in many ways, it's not so much about the plot itself. some of it was good directing and cinematography and writing too, sure. but matthew really STOLE the show. imho, it's his best performance in anything he ever played.
@@maggyfrogI agree! He was the reason that True Detective was so compelling. I also think that having three versions of his character at different stages as added to the excellence of the first season. Woody was great too but it was more subdued and he played a straight man of sorts to Matthew. Their chemistry was great. But yeah, True Detective is not the classic that it was without Matthew.
@@baileytate3938 exactly. rustin changed a lot during the course of season 1, yet it's still the same character, just like how people in real life change over time yet they are the same people. matthew pulled it off with such perfection that you never once doubt that this is the same character no matter if the scenes go back and forth from the past and present, with different tones in dialogue, different perspectives, yet matthew maintained his rust cohle. most other actors need to rely on heavily changing their appearance, but it was his evolving performance that knocked it out of the park. i don't even really pay that much attention to the plot when i rewatch season 1. it's really just mostly to pick up on the nuances of the character and his dynamic with marty that really makes it a worthwhile rewatch. even when i try to pay attention to the plot, and it is well-written, it's always the performance of the characters that truly pull you in. when i first watched TD, it was the younger sharper rustin that i liked best, but in my last rewatch the older rustin just spoke volumes that i didn't appreciate enough before. such a brilliant actor matthew is.
Yeah season 1 is unanimously the most amazing stand alone show after that true detective fall off, season 2 was a huge glow down but season 3 was better than season 2 but after watching latest season I think season 2 was badly treated.
As someone currently rewatching season 2, you really should rewatch season 2 before you start reappraising it, because yes it is bad. Overly maligned, but still bad.
I still don’t understand why they decided to keep the tongue footage in. It makes no sense, given the ultimate ending with the cleaning ladies. How did Annie Kowtok’s FRESH tongue end up in Tsalal??
Lopez just doesn't care about continuity and quality of writing. She thinks in "cool moments", put them in the script and then glue them together with "anything goes" and filler.
It honestly feels like the entire show was written by chatGPT. Everything is so obviously shallow and childishly simplistic. So ironic given the fact that one of the goals Lopez had was to finally tackle important social issues that the previous shows apparently in her eyes avoided. Modern film makers don't understand people, they only see them as simplistic caricatures and that's how their art looks like. It's worse because this season had so much going for it. Amazing setting, competent cast, almost guaranteed creative freedom,...
"Where Rust Cohle and Marty Hart talk about the cosmos and human nature in their long car talks, Danvers and Navarro talk about Tinder." What a perfect encapsulation of the seasons' respective levels of sophistication.
the most egregious part of night country to me was how it was concluded. The whole theme of the earlier seasons of true detective was solving the case but still grappling with the larger unknowable social forces that create these cases in the first place. In night country the ending is too neat and sanitized. Ultimately this was an incredibly reactionary tv show whose ending serves to promote the status quo of individual good actors defeating the bad guys. annie's death being avenged rightfully by a group of aggrieved individuals, jodie fosters character covering that and the cop's death up. Them somehow managing to shut down the mine and save the town. And they all lived happily ever after. So shit
On the point about Pizzolatto's behaviour, saying you don't condone it and then using the analogy you did, is kind of fucking wild. If anything justifies his behaviour it's exactly that situation. They didn't take his baby and raise it, they killed and are puppeteering its corpse.
I could maybe understand if it was just sub par and didn’t hit the mark.. but this show was so bad and she made no qualms about making it overtly political. We get it.. white people bad.
the problem with referencing the dyatlov pass incident is that it already has the likeliest explanation called a "slab avalanche" which is caused by the slight incline in the slope where they pitched their tent. by pitching their tent in that particular incline, the winds at the time blew just enough snow downward, causing the "slab" of snow to build up right over where the tent was pitched, and that "slab" of snow literally just fell on top of the tent. they likely would have still been alive the, but they had to get out of the crushed tent and into the blizzard, where they died of the elements. their gouged out eyes / faces were likely just caused by animals. the show otoh has no meaningful explanation why the men died of cardiac arrest, as in, a sudden death and not hypothermia.
Exactly. Burnt corneas and blown out eardrums are not the result of an avalanche. but you gotta create intrigue and then not explain it because you can't.
The Dyatlov pass has an explanation: the slab avalanche - mentioned as such in the show. the problem is that the scientists do not have the same marks of crushing and you can`t have an avalanche on a flat surface.
It may not have been the kind of childish and amateurish abomination Netflix originals are, but the fact that they ruined such amazing foundations means that Night Country is arguably WORSE than something like Emily In Paris or Sex Education. True Detective and Jodie Foster are self-explanatory. Alaska is at least the second best setting in the series. Dyatlov Pass references are really fascinating. And yet: incoherence, nonsense, noble savages and absurdly stupid, weak men.
My thought when I started watching the season was "She is a great actress, surely they won't waste her talent and time on a character that's purely functional". Back then I thought they cared about quality and consistency. Of course, in the end they made her purely functional character who made no difference whatsoever. Funny how she got probably the same screen time in Andor and how much more they've done with her character in that show.
certain is a lot of police corruption and incompetence...spoilers: .they either are killing people themselves and hiding the bodies, assaulting civilians over simply being flipped off, or letting people get away murder and assault based on the criminals' race, gender, political beliefs, and sexual orientation. Then for their investigation skills, they don't even bother until much later to get finger prints.....which rather quickly solved the whole dumb thing besides the whole letting criminals go, included being perfectly fine with what amounts to an underage teenager creating child pornography.
It was - at best - okay? But what really pi**ed me off were the "I clapped"-moments and references to the much better season one, like the swirl motive or talk about the Yellow King and flat circles. That said: True detective is, as you said, at its best, when it doesn't explain its mysteries. This is why I love the ending of season two when Rust describes his near death experience, when he felt that his daughter was there, calling for him. The scene is VERY ambiguous. I never felt comfort in what Rust described. I was frightened. I thought: What if there actually IS something out there that just waits for us getting closer to death and then deceives us to follow it into the "light", something like a Cthulhu-flytrap for us pesky humans. Lopez is the wrong showrunner for another season. True Detective is dead to me after this abomination.
Almost every character is one note and they don't progress anywhere. Notable exceptions are Hank because he had some sort of arc and Kawiik because he is just a normal person among them. I don't blame actors, they didn't have much to play cause I really doubt that Lopes had well thought out backstory and vision for every characters, seeing how well she "researched" and written everything else.
I'm sure someone else has already said this somewhere but the Dyatlov Pass Incident has been (somewhat recently) forensically "solved," and they actually directly reference this on the show. The cause of the real-life incident was a slab avalanche-the same thing that is cited as the cause of death for the researchers in the show.
im not claiming to be quasimodo or anything, but i predicted it was a steamy turd from the very first scene. the bit where the hunter is lying down in the snow and the caribou are off in the distance. it was a tell tale sign that whoever was running the show was ok with half measures and probably surrounded by yes people
In my mind, there is no true detective save for season one. The other seasons are entirely separate shows and entities. Season one got out all of the things the show was trying to say because that's how it was intended originally. HBO just insisted that they make more seasons because they have a new smash hit critical darling to farm. It's fine if you enjoy or get something out of the other seasons but let's quit pretending that it'll ever hit the highs of season 1.
The premise, setting and Jodie Foster had me so excited for this. I turned it off halfway through episode 3. The magical realism is laughable, the ghosty scares hacky, shallow characters, clunky exposition, ect ect. Not to mention the shit student film lighting makes it look like a backlot green screen most of the time, completely wasting the fact that they all froze their asses off on location! The whole execution was bad without even factoring in the idea that it’s True Detective.
The in universe explanation for the existence of the AI tour poster would hold more water if "making an ai generated metal poster for boomers out of boredom" sounded like something a real teenager would actually do.
"Season one was just lightning in a bottle". I think that sums it up. Maybe HBO should stop making True Detective and spend their time and money on something new. All we have today are sequels, prequels and remakes. No one wants to do anything original. I am sure you are right, and Issa López had a script with no connection to the True Detective story. Sadly the a holes at HBO are cowards and can't risk anything on something new. We live in sad times.
I started watching first season again last night maybe for the 15th times. And every second, every line, every scene of the show is just fucking mental orgasm...the pace, the story, the story telling, the amazing editing style, IT IS JUST SHEER PERFECTION...
jodie foster's performance made this season watchable. but in retrospect, i am never going to re-watch this. such a terrible ending with terrible execution. it's only 6 eps, so the showrunner and writers should have trimmed down significantly on the subplots. better yet, it should have just been its own show called "night country" with no connection to true detectve. all the freaking spirals amounted to pretty much nothing. had it been its own show, they could have gone 100% on the direction of cosmic horror without having to be obligated to have a "rational" true detective ending.
@@little.miss.flawless.70 I will concede that the ending can feel anticlimactic to some people, but Season 3 is tight and engaging enough it makes the journey worthwhile. IMO
I enjoyed your critique as much as anything I recall watching in recent times. Your delivery is wonderful, if I may say so - insightful and measured but never unkind. I came across your channel only today but am newly subscribed, etc. I have even clicked on notifications. Thank you. ps I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. (For anyone familiar with the pudding dish, I myself think that “True Detective: Half-Baked Alaska” more aptly describes this non-hot mess.)
One reason Season 1 is hard to top is because you have 2 Hollywood actors giving what is quite possibly their best on-screen performances on a TV-show.
Started off interesting but I wish they wouldn’t have made any connections to season 1 bc none of them made sense. The ending was… meh whatever. Nothing will ever compare to season 1 tho.
The connections to S1 were pretty shallow and empty. I think we can all agree that it was only there to simply get people on board and to get people to "pay attention".
Season 1 is arguably the greatest season of television ever. Seasons 2 and 3 were still very good, just not all-time great. Season 4 isn't even the same genre, and is extremely low in quality.
There was one scene I actually liked, when Pete's father described saving him as a child from death. You actually felt for the guy, he was a good father. But then they fucked that up as well.
Taylor, with all due respect, the acting was horrendous. Jodie Foster was AWFUL. She looked completely out of place the entire time, she looked like a child playing dress up in her parents clothes. And what was with the no makeup except for heavy eyeliner? She was starting to remind me of Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones.
I seriously wonder if certain shows aren’t being watched while they’re being made: did ANYONE watch the dailies for this dreck while it was being filmed? I knew this would suck right from the first shot: spooked caribou stampede off a cliff, a hunter goes “huh, weird” and we have no clue when this is happening, or what the last sunset of the year has to do with anything. Poorly written drama. Poorly conceived characters. Rambling subplots that added nothing but uninteresting time waste. How many boyfriends and ex-husbands did the Chief have anyway, how many kids or ex-kids or step-kids? Just trying to figure out who was who and how they were related was puzzling as hell. Terrible show. No way could I finish it, and based on what I’ve read, I missed mothing. If I’d known this show would include a ton of supernatural mumbo-jumbo to explain things or help fill in gaps, I’d have never watched. That’s as tired a trope as The Big Bad Company vs. The Local Townsfolk. 🙄
I forgave all my gripes about this season right up until the bog reveal at the end where some cleaning ladies went straight espionage and commando. Then i was upset lol.
Couple of points to take: 1. Season 1 was a masterpiece because Pizzaman was constantly writing/updating and changing the writing until he managed to get HBO to sign off on the show. The writing has been something that Pizzaman was working for quite a long time and it shows. 2. HBO managed to get Cary Joji Fukunaga to direct the entire show and he was a very underrated director at that time. 3. The character chemistry between Rust and Marty is a perfect pairing for season 1. Season 2 was a complete utter shitshow because Pizzaman managed to kick Fukunaga off the show and decided to write the entire season 2's writing in a span of year. Pretty sure this is the reason why HBO told him to get off the writing and just keep him as producer for season 3 and season 4.
For me, the big flaw in this season is that we should feel the impact of an unknowable dark force but still get human size criminals to arrest, driven mad by it. This was not well executed.
Also, I can’t believe you praised foster acting. She did a terrible job with terrible material but Reis is a boxer and she carried what little was left of this show on her back
Sidebar: How can you say there’s no defense for time being a flat circle having been mentioned in season 4 when it’s the literal climax of the series? We see at the end that the woman the guy was seeing when he was shaking was the cop in the future. People just want to willfully hate things.
I have an idea for a new season. True Detective- The Early Years. In the early 1930s H P Lovecraft became obsessed with the Mary Pickford film Sparrows. A movie about a farm south of New Orleans were unwanted babies are abandoned. Lovecraft had to come to New Orleans to see if it really existed. They could do a fictional account of a true story
...so you're saying Season 5 of STRANGERS THINGS is gonna be mediocre too? (*PSSSSSSSST* Looking forward that inevitable review & this one was unexpectedly needed),
People need to take a step back and stop the whining. TD season 1 was just a lucky mix of all the elements in a show managing to work supremely well together, adding up to an actual masterpiece. The other seasons are all just piggybacking of s1's success, they were never meant to exist, it's just a network trying to make a franchise out of thin air. Comparing any of them to s1 is just pointless at this point. Be thankful we even got that one season and stop watching the new ones if you expect them to recapture even 1% of s1's magic, that's just naive and whiny.
You hit the nail on the head when you said it’s a product. All it takes is looking at her past work. Here in mexico Lopez is mostly “known” for putting out one mediocre cookie cutter rom-com after another pretty much the entirety of her career. The only real exception being a couple movies about young people struggling with the reality of cartels which has become a cliche since damn near every other up and coming aspiring director wanting to be taken seriously chooses that subject matter to make some really hollow social commentary akin to the acab stuff in Night Country. These two are the kinds of movies that plague so-called mexican cinema and anything else sadly struggles to get screening slots at cinemas, let alone funding. So ultimately Lopez has just pivoted from one kind of product to another and her aspirations are evidently not artistic.
I feel like there was 10 plot lines that were under developed, as if this was meant for 10 episodes and hours of plot was left on the cutting room floor. And the lack of any sinister villain really leaves no lasting impact. The murder mystery ended up being done by characters we knew nothing about that hadn’t been in the show since the first episode. There were countless supernatural aspects that led to nothing. And the end pretty much romanticizes the suicide of the mentally ill. Horrible season
Literally the only piece of detective work that was done by the main characters this entire season was checking the hatch of the ice cave entrance for prints. After which the entire story was explained to them in great detail by other characters. Any other shred of evidence or police work was done by Pete, who got cucked into killing his dad after he was kicked out of his house by his wife for working late on a multiple homicide for less than two weeks, or by Qavik who found the only person of interest and inflicted them of what the spiral meant. The same spiral that was very heavy handedly used by the marketing team to ensure people who liked season 1 would even watch an episode of season 4. Even the season 5 announcement used the spiral. People praise the “setting” of this show, it was filmed in Iceland, with fake snow and ice. In fact you only see a characters breath outside twice this entire season, and one of those times it’s CGI. This season had poor writing, poor execution, poor dialogue, and characters that were entirely unlikable. Danvers is a racist, abusive, philandering piece of shit, and Navarros whole gimmick is that she has hereditary schizophrenia and she can fight grown men. Also, how does a uniformed officer pass a psyche eval with schizophrenia and get to keep her facial piercings while on duty?
It's strange to discuss how you watched do the right thing during George Floyd to talk about how timeless it is, but don't see how connecting this show to him still falls in the same category as timelessness within american history. George Floyd is relevant to you now so this feels post-Floyd and dating itself, but protesting against police brutality has been around since the police were formed. So your critique of that part of this season feels tone deaf to me
The second season was comedy. Not sure what everyone expected. There will never be another season like season 1 and even that jumped the shark a bit. Jesus get over it.
Great video. It was never a terrible show or anything, just mediocre. Frustrating to see it at a 92 on RT but it’s not the first time a virtue signaling script won praise by the critics.
Before watching this here is my two cents on True Detective. After the first season when it was announced a second season would be ready to go by summer i thought that was an insanely short time frame considering it took Nick Pizollato over ten years to get the first season is game shape. I remember after the first episode of the second season thinking how it felt like a first draft with Vince Vaughn working hard to make lemonade out of crab apples. This to me was the worst decision Nick could have made. It was arrogant and delusional…..i dont think this show recovered from that decision.
am i the only one who thinks that matthew mcconaughey is the real hero of season 1? you can take the exact same story with the exact same character arcs but just change the actor for rustin cohle and it's nowhere near as captivating as matthew's. usually, great shows and movies are successful because of the writing quality, but in the case of season 1 TD, i find that nic p's writing only plays second fiddle to matthew's performance of the role. it's more a character study than it is a plot-driven story. obviously, the writing quality matters, but i highly doubt it would have reached the same meteoric critical praise without matthew m's performance. i watched somewhere that the actor actually wrote something like 300 pages worth of material just to prepare himself to play the role of rust. i think he isn't credited enough as to the fleshing out of rust's cohle's character development.
Nick is not the one who took the decision of airing season 2 so soon... HBO did. One of the HBO exec even apologized for that and that's why s3 aired much later.
I have an idea: How about they stop releasing True Detective seasons? It worked as a mini series, it can just stop. Is as if they want to match the bad writing of Game of Thrones S7 & S8 with each new season.
there is one one true season of true detective, the rest of the seasons are like the jarhead sequels, not even related or supposed to be a true sequel to the original...
As a professional actor and a fan of Jodie Foster, I judge the acting to be incredibly poor. I've never seen Jodie worse and the support case were hopeless. Particularly noteworthy is the other lead actress, appalling!
It is an abomination. Can anyone explain the trailer they find to me full of sculpture/art that beckons back to S1? I don't believe this was ever explained at all.
The writer of this has no concept of crime, drama, evidence, tension, human interaction, or set up/pay off. The people who made this should be embarrassed. This is a school project, not a serious show.
Fair criticisms, Taylor. I wanted to like this season so much, but they lost me with the last two episodes of this season. As you said, this was extremely mediocre. Great video
True Detective Season 1 - masterful lightning in a bottle. Excellent writing, plotting, pacing, dialogue, mythology, and acting. True Detective Season 2 - convoluted and confusing with too many subplots and minor characters, but ultimately bearing the TD universe DNA, and the story is interesting. Season 3 - return to season 1 form. Interesting characters and story, dialogue was believable and story was mysterious. Season 4 - this doesnt feel like True Detective honestly. Too much agenda and not enough story. Dialogue was stilted, poor writing, plotting wasn't tight, no true mythology in the story, just a lot if lifting of ideas from season 1. Love(d) Jodi Foster, excellent actor, probably the best thing about this season, but that's it. It's too bad. I think season 4 has probably assassinated the True Detective franchise.
I enjoyed the first few episodes actually really enjoyed them. It kinda fell apart unfortunately. I thought the setting was pretty sweet though very 30 days of night. I really thought it was going to go full lovecraftian horror with all those bodies together. Unfortunate how it ended up being just a bleh story. Could have been an awesome cosmic horror.
True Detective never managed to keep the quality of the first season. Compare this to Fargo TV show that have at least 3 excelent seasons, one average and one kinda bad, but even that bad fourth season of Fargo is a masterpiece compared to this.
TD Season 1= Masterpiece, TD Season 2 = Enjoyable, although not as good as Season 1, TD Season 3 = Very lacking in the writing department (not even Mahershala Ali could save that show, and he was great in it), but watchable, TD Season 4 = Utter non-sensical woke crap; avoid it like the plague if you enjoyed any of the previous seasons.
The True Detective is trapped deep within a cave, and we are forced to watch its shadows play upon the wall
People not leaving the cave enjoy TD Night Country.
A locked room*
😂
“It’s like someone’s memory of a subversive, existential genre piece… and the memory is fading.” -Detective Cust Rohl
The perfect analogy. I hope you write poetry and don't waste your talents.
7:35
I’m glad you mentioned how two-dimensional all of the characters felt. They didn’t feel like people. They felt like they were checkmarks on a list.
I'm willing to bet that for each character Lopez made a half page of backstory and description at most.
got the same feeling about a lot of things in this show, that it was just a checklist exercise. like each scene has to have either a bear, a spiral or an orange. there needs to be 1 person pointing like a zombie or saying "shes awake". every second scene needs to have danvers saying "youre not asking the right question"
I condone Nic taking the piss out of the new season. I think creators should derided their stuff being handed off by corporate suits to be dragged through the mud and turned into utter shit that’s out of their control.
@@ryanrich06 isn’t Chris super duper polite anymore and unwilling to say anything negative cause he wants to enter the industry now?
Also TD s4 sucks really bad. Cry about it I guess?
Especially since they still put his name on it.
My favorite part was when the cleaning lady said, "Look at me - I'm the true detective, now."
I had to go back a re-watch season 1 to cleanse my pallet after STRUGGLING to get through season 4. The first season had such a dark, chilling, realistic feeling to it. This season feels like it tried so hard to be that, and it just completely missed the mark in every single facet. I've never been so frustratingly fascinated at such a departure in quality from such a ground breaking show.
You could cleanse your palate , in regards to series 4, by watching an episode of 'Saved By The Bell'. No need to reach for Season 1.
@@DunkanIdaho1 Yeah... I watched an old episode of Gilligan's Island and got the bad implausible Night Country writing out of my mouth...
Season one is the only good one.
I mean... season 2 was already a departure in quality. I'm confused as to why people are accusing Lopez of "ruining True Detective" when really, Pizzolato did it all on his own is season two. I never watch season 3, so I don't know if it pick up again there or if it's just as bad as 2. Not saying 4 was better than 2, but I didn't think it was worst either.
@@DunkanIdaho1 I've seen more compelling mystery stories watching Scooby-Doo.
Also, I think the episode in the first season where Rust and Marty are going back and forth telling the cover-up story about what went down when they murdered those two child traffickers is a god damn cinematic work of art IMO.
One of my absolute favorite parts of that season 🤌
especially the part where marty says "i will tell it the same way i've told it since, because its the only way it happened" and it cuts to the flashback where the events are immediately shown as different than he says lmao
I feel that True Detective never existed after Season 1. Nic Pizzolatto had an awesome southern gothic story to tell, growing up in the setting of Louisiana. The later anthology seasons feel like stories trying to chase that same theme of the first season, which doesn't fit so well in other settings. I do like aspects of the later seasons, but I feel Nic didn't plan for future titles under the same title.
my unpopular opinion is that matthew mcconaughey is at least 85% of the reason why season 1 is the masterpiece that it is. sure, the writing is good, but HIS rust cohle is the heart of the story. i can't imagine it having the success it has if you change the actor for rustin.
edit:
this is why nic p couldn't replicate the success of the first season even though he wrote seasons 2 & 3. in many ways, it's not so much about the plot itself. some of it was good directing and cinematography and writing too, sure. but matthew really STOLE the show. imho, it's his best performance in anything he ever played.
@@maggyfrogI agree! He was the reason that True Detective was so compelling. I also think that having three versions of his character at different stages as added to the excellence of the first season.
Woody was great too but it was more subdued and he played a straight man of sorts to Matthew. Their chemistry was great.
But yeah, True Detective is not the classic that it was without Matthew.
@@baileytate3938
exactly. rustin changed a lot during the course of season 1, yet it's still the same character, just like how people in real life change over time yet they are the same people. matthew pulled it off with such perfection that you never once doubt that this is the same character no matter if the scenes go back and forth from the past and present, with different tones in dialogue, different perspectives, yet matthew maintained his rust cohle. most other actors need to rely on heavily changing their appearance, but it was his evolving performance that knocked it out of the park.
i don't even really pay that much attention to the plot when i rewatch season 1. it's really just mostly to pick up on the nuances of the character and his dynamic with marty that really makes it a worthwhile rewatch. even when i try to pay attention to the plot, and it is well-written, it's always the performance of the characters that truly pull you in. when i first watched TD, it was the younger sharper rustin that i liked best, but in my last rewatch the older rustin just spoke volumes that i didn't appreciate enough before. such a brilliant actor matthew is.
Yeah season 1 is unanimously the most amazing stand alone show after that true detective fall off, season 2 was a huge glow down but season 3 was better than season 2 but after watching latest season I think season 2 was badly treated.
Season 3 is much better for me than season 1.
I've read so many rave reviews of this season I thought I was going insane. This review was cathartic.
Only the insane would give a rave review of Shite Country
@@cmk921😂 well said 🤝
Paid shills/those trying to ingratiate themselves with paid shills.
When media companies promote things super hard, you know it’s gunna be trash.
@@cmk921Bro it has a higher rating and viewership than the first season 💀
Gotta be the result of a cult of elite satanist
This new season made me realise, True Detective Season 2 wasn't actually that bad after all.
I don’t think season 2 was bad but more it was just average
I think it is good by itself, it just doesn't feel like true detective
Lmao
As someone currently rewatching season 2, you really should rewatch season 2 before you start reappraising it, because yes it is bad. Overly maligned, but still bad.
I’ve always liked season 2. The series has def. gotten worse with each season though, with the latest season being the first to actually suck…
I still don’t understand why they decided to keep the tongue footage in. It makes no sense, given the ultimate ending with the cleaning ladies. How did Annie Kowtok’s FRESH tongue end up in Tsalal??
Lopez just doesn't care about continuity and quality of writing. She thinks in "cool moments", put them in the script and then glue them together with "anything goes" and filler.
It turned out the truest detectives are just the friends we made along the way
....This will happen again.....time is a flat circle....
It honestly feels like the entire show was written by chatGPT. Everything is so obviously shallow and childishly simplistic. So ironic given the fact that one of the goals Lopez had was to finally tackle important social issues that the previous shows apparently in her eyes avoided. Modern film makers don't understand people, they only see them as simplistic caricatures and that's how their art looks like.
It's worse because this season had so much going for it. Amazing setting, competent cast, almost guaranteed creative freedom,...
"Where Rust Cohle and Marty Hart talk about the cosmos and human nature in their long car talks, Danvers and Navarro talk about Tinder."
What a perfect encapsulation of the seasons' respective levels of sophistication.
the most egregious part of night country to me was how it was concluded. The whole theme of the earlier seasons of true detective was solving the case but still grappling with the larger unknowable social forces that create these cases in the first place. In night country the ending is too neat and sanitized. Ultimately this was an incredibly reactionary tv show whose ending serves to promote the status quo of individual good actors defeating the bad guys. annie's death being avenged rightfully by a group of aggrieved individuals, jodie fosters character covering that and the cop's death up. Them somehow managing to shut down the mine and save the town. And they all lived happily ever after. So shit
On the point about Pizzolatto's behaviour, saying you don't condone it and then using the analogy you did, is kind of fucking wild. If anything justifies his behaviour it's exactly that situation.
They didn't take his baby and raise it, they killed and are puppeteering its corpse.
I could maybe understand if it was just sub par and didn’t hit the mark.. but this show was so bad and she made no qualms about making it overtly political. We get it.. white people bad.
I didn’t even realize the connections to Mare of Easttown. Wow! It’s a lot alike but Mare of Easttown was waaaay better
Mare of Eastown is actually better show, I almost can see it as True Detective's season...
If Mare of Eastown was a season of True Detective the love affair with True Detective would be off the charts.
the problem with referencing the dyatlov pass incident is that it already has the likeliest explanation called a "slab avalanche" which is caused by the slight incline in the slope where they pitched their tent. by pitching their tent in that particular incline, the winds at the time blew just enough snow downward, causing the "slab" of snow to build up right over where the tent was pitched, and that "slab" of snow literally just fell on top of the tent. they likely would have still been alive the, but they had to get out of the crushed tent and into the blizzard, where they died of the elements. their gouged out eyes / faces were likely just caused by animals.
the show otoh has no meaningful explanation why the men died of cardiac arrest, as in, a sudden death and not hypothermia.
Exactly. Burnt corneas and blown out eardrums are not the result of an avalanche. but you gotta create intrigue and then not explain it because you can't.
The Dyatlov pass has an explanation: the slab avalanche - mentioned as such in the show. the problem is that the scientists do not have the same marks of crushing and you can`t have an avalanche on a flat surface.
And it was actually radioactive snow monsters working for the KGB.
More like intergalactic aliens experimenting on random citizens.
It may not have been the kind of childish and amateurish abomination Netflix originals are, but the fact that they ruined such amazing foundations means that Night Country is arguably WORSE than something like Emily In Paris or Sex Education. True Detective and Jodie Foster are self-explanatory. Alaska is at least the second best setting in the series. Dyatlov Pass references are really fascinating. And yet: incoherence, nonsense, noble savages and absurdly stupid, weak men.
This is an interesting case to be made.
Fiona Shaw was wasted, that’s certain.
Who was she cooking for? Ahhhh!
My thought when I started watching the season was "She is a great actress, surely they won't waste her talent and time on a character that's purely functional". Back then I thought they cared about quality and consistency. Of course, in the end they made her purely functional character who made no difference whatsoever. Funny how she got probably the same screen time in Andor and how much more they've done with her character in that show.
certain is a lot of police corruption and incompetence...spoilers:
.they either are killing people themselves and hiding the bodies, assaulting civilians over simply being flipped off, or letting people get away murder and assault based on the criminals' race, gender, political beliefs, and sexual orientation. Then for their investigation skills, they don't even bother until much later to get finger prints.....which rather quickly solved the whole dumb thing
besides the whole letting criminals go, included being perfectly fine with what amounts to an underage teenager creating child pornography.
It's almost like the writers are ok with political violence and child grooming...
It was - at best - okay? But what really pi**ed me off were the "I clapped"-moments and references to the much better season one, like the swirl motive or talk about the Yellow King and flat circles.
That said: True detective is, as you said, at its best, when it doesn't explain its mysteries. This is why I love the ending of season two when Rust describes his near death experience, when he felt that his daughter was there, calling for him. The scene is VERY ambiguous. I never felt comfort in what Rust described. I was frightened. I thought: What if there actually IS something out there that just waits for us getting closer to death and then deceives us to follow it into the "light", something like a Cthulhu-flytrap for us pesky humans.
Lopez is the wrong showrunner for another season. True Detective is dead to me after this abomination.
"Well acted".
If every character was meant to be unlikeable.
Almost every character is one note and they don't progress anywhere. Notable exceptions are Hank because he had some sort of arc and Kawiik because he is just a normal person among them. I don't blame actors, they didn't have much to play cause I really doubt that Lopes had well thought out backstory and vision for every characters, seeing how well she "researched" and written everything else.
I'm sure someone else has already said this somewhere but the Dyatlov Pass Incident has been (somewhat recently) forensically "solved," and they actually directly reference this on the show. The cause of the real-life incident was a slab avalanche-the same thing that is cited as the cause of death for the researchers in the show.
It was so bad that 5 mins in I had to check if I was watching the right show.
im not claiming to be quasimodo or anything, but i predicted it was a steamy turd from the very first scene. the bit where the hunter is lying down in the snow and the caribou are off in the distance. it was a tell tale sign that whoever was running the show was ok with half measures and probably surrounded by yes people
In my mind, there is no true detective save for season one. The other seasons are entirely separate shows and entities. Season one got out all of the things the show was trying to say because that's how it was intended originally. HBO just insisted that they make more seasons because they have a new smash hit critical darling to farm. It's fine if you enjoy or get something out of the other seasons but let's quit pretending that it'll ever hit the highs of season 1.
The premise, setting and Jodie Foster had me so excited for this. I turned it off halfway through episode 3.
The magical realism is laughable, the ghosty scares hacky, shallow characters, clunky exposition, ect ect. Not to mention the shit student film lighting makes it look like a backlot green screen most of the time, completely wasting the fact that they all froze their asses off on location!
The whole execution was bad without even factoring in the idea that it’s True Detective.
The in universe explanation for the existence of the AI tour poster would hold more water if "making an ai generated metal poster for boomers out of boredom" sounded like something a real teenager would actually do.
"Season one was just lightning in a bottle". I think that sums it up. Maybe HBO should stop making True Detective and spend their time and money on something new. All we have today are sequels, prequels and remakes. No one wants to do anything original. I am sure you are right, and Issa López had a script with no connection to the True Detective story. Sadly the a holes at HBO are cowards and can't risk anything on something new. We live in sad times.
Ive already mourned this series seeing as Issa Lopez is reportedly coming back for season 5
Issa Lopez is terrible. Her excuse for being caught using AI is sad, and her attention to detail sucks
I started watching first season again last night maybe for the 15th times. And every second, every line, every scene of the show is just fucking mental orgasm...the pace, the story, the story telling, the amazing editing style, IT IS JUST SHEER PERFECTION...
jodie foster's performance made this season watchable. but in retrospect, i am never going to re-watch this. such a terrible ending with terrible execution. it's only 6 eps, so the showrunner and writers should have trimmed down significantly on the subplots. better yet, it should have just been its own show called "night country" with no connection to true detectve. all the freaking spirals amounted to pretty much nothing. had it been its own show, they could have gone 100% on the direction of cosmic horror without having to be obligated to have a "rational" true detective ending.
The show really should have just been a limited mini series and that's it.
I tried with season 4 and just felt like I was watching X-Files
Season 3 is worth your time. It's as wonderful as season 1, imo
@@little.miss.flawless.70 I will concede that the ending can feel anticlimactic to some people, but Season 3 is tight and engaging enough it makes the journey worthwhile. IMO
@@DeepEye1994 I realized I like season 3 because it felt like a novel.
The think I don’t see anyone talk about is the fact to the key to Season 1 is the director, who is absent after season 1.
I enjoyed your critique as much as anything I recall watching in recent times. Your delivery is wonderful, if I may say so - insightful and measured but never unkind. I came across your channel only today but am newly subscribed, etc. I have even clicked on notifications. Thank you. ps I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. (For anyone familiar with the pudding dish, I myself think that “True Detective: Half-Baked Alaska” more aptly describes this non-hot mess.)
One reason Season 1 is hard to top is because you have 2 Hollywood actors giving what is quite possibly their best on-screen performances on a TV-show.
Started off interesting but I wish they wouldn’t have made any connections to season 1 bc none of them made sense. The ending was… meh whatever. Nothing will ever compare to season 1 tho.
The connections to S1 were pretty shallow and empty. I think we can all agree that it was only there to simply get people on board and to get people to "pay attention".
Chatgpt can you write a true detective story about good indigenous women kill bad scientist men
The acting wasn’t that bad? Sir, I refuse to be gaslit like this. The acting is atrocious.
Maybe the True Detective was the friends we made along the flat circle (which is time viewed from a higher dimension)
Great review mate, just subscribed to your channel!
Can a piece of fiction be considered a sequel if it doesn't have any narrative relation to the original?
The spin off and sequel border isn't exactly clear. Some may consider this more of a spin off than a sequel.
Cary Joji Fukunaga is the reason Season 1 is good. Every other season proves it.
Time is a flat circle...or something.
Season 1 is arguably the greatest season of television ever. Seasons 2 and 3 were still very good, just not all-time great. Season 4 isn't even the same genre, and is extremely low in quality.
There was one scene I actually liked, when Pete's father described saving him as a child from death. You actually felt for the guy, he was a good father.
But then they fucked that up as well.
Taylor, with all due respect, the acting was horrendous. Jodie Foster was AWFUL. She looked completely out of place the entire time, she looked like a child playing dress up in her parents clothes. And what was with the no makeup except for heavy eyeliner? She was starting to remind me of Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones.
I seriously wonder if certain shows aren’t being watched while they’re being made: did ANYONE watch the dailies for this dreck while it was being filmed?
I knew this would suck right from the first shot: spooked caribou stampede off a cliff, a hunter goes “huh, weird” and we have no clue when this is happening, or what the last sunset of the year has to do with anything.
Poorly written drama. Poorly conceived characters. Rambling subplots that added nothing but uninteresting time waste.
How many boyfriends and ex-husbands did the Chief have anyway, how many kids or ex-kids or step-kids? Just trying to figure out who was who and how they were related was puzzling as hell.
Terrible show. No way could I finish it, and based on what I’ve read, I missed mothing. If I’d known this show would include a ton of supernatural mumbo-jumbo to explain things or help fill in gaps, I’d have never watched. That’s as tired a trope as The Big Bad Company vs. The Local Townsfolk. 🙄
10:13 When you begin your explanation with, “This idea is…” maybe it’s time to admit your ideas aren’t very good. 🤷🏾♂️
Great review
This video was not recommended to me, nor was it in my sub box. Wonder if "killed" in the title is messing up the reach. Either way, good vid
The only thing that matters, is that it's about two strong and independent women, who need no man. 😅
I liked this season.
I forgave all my gripes about this season right up until the bog reveal at the end where some cleaning ladies went straight espionage and commando. Then i was upset lol.
Very entertaining analysis.
very solid take
Who killed True Detective? The usual suspects. Stunning and brave crowd.
Man, you found a really long and convoluted way of saying this season just sucked ass.
This show should’ve been a miniseries. It’s as simple as that.
Couple of points to take:
1. Season 1 was a masterpiece because Pizzaman was constantly writing/updating and changing the writing until he managed to get HBO to sign off on the show. The writing has been something that Pizzaman was working for quite a long time and it shows.
2. HBO managed to get Cary Joji Fukunaga to direct the entire show and he was a very underrated director at that time.
3. The character chemistry between Rust and Marty is a perfect pairing for season 1.
Season 2 was a complete utter shitshow because Pizzaman managed to kick Fukunaga off the show and decided to write the entire season 2's writing in a span of year. Pretty sure this is the reason why HBO told him to get off the writing and just keep him as producer for season 3 and season 4.
For me, the big flaw in this season is that we should feel the impact of an unknowable dark force but still get human size criminals to arrest, driven mad by it. This was not well executed.
Also, the structure of season 1 was a big part of its greatness, which was never replicated again.
Also, I can’t believe you praised foster acting. She did a terrible job with terrible material but Reis is a boxer and she carried what little was left of this show on her back
Sidebar: How can you say there’s no defense for time being a flat circle having been mentioned in season 4 when it’s the literal climax of the series? We see at the end that the woman the guy was seeing when he was shaking was the cop in the future.
People just want to willfully hate things.
I have an idea for a new season. True Detective- The Early Years. In the early 1930s H P Lovecraft became obsessed with the Mary Pickford film Sparrows. A movie about a farm south of New Orleans were unwanted babies are abandoned. Lovecraft had to come to New Orleans to see if it really existed. They could do a fictional account of a true story
The ultra feminist writer is who killed it and she's renewed for season 5.. Another big steaming pile of garbage on the way.
...so you're saying Season 5 of STRANGERS THINGS is gonna be mediocre too?
(*PSSSSSSSST* Looking forward that inevitable review & this one was unexpectedly needed),
When you feel like your valuable time was wasted then it was a terrible show.
People need to take a step back and stop the whining. TD season 1 was just a lucky mix of all the elements in a show managing to work supremely well together, adding up to an actual masterpiece. The other seasons are all just piggybacking of s1's success, they were never meant to exist, it's just a network trying to make a franchise out of thin air. Comparing any of them to s1 is just pointless at this point. Be thankful we even got that one season and stop watching the new ones if you expect them to recapture even 1% of s1's magic, that's just naive and whiny.
Season 4 promised too much than it could deliver that even Ms Foster cannot save the day, ugh… I should say save the night.
You lost me at "this season is not a complete abomination"
Did anyone noticed that every conversation is repeated at least twice.
I watch the first episode and give up this shiaaat
You hit the nail on the head when you said it’s a product. All it takes is looking at her past work. Here in mexico Lopez is mostly “known” for putting out one mediocre cookie cutter rom-com after another pretty much the entirety of her career. The only real exception being a couple movies about young people struggling with the reality of cartels which has become a cliche since damn near every other up and coming aspiring director wanting to be taken seriously chooses that subject matter to make some really hollow social commentary akin to the acab stuff in Night Country. These two are the kinds of movies that plague so-called mexican cinema and anything else sadly struggles to get screening slots at cinemas, let alone funding. So ultimately Lopez has just pivoted from one kind of product to another and her aspirations are evidently not artistic.
I feel like there was 10 plot lines that were under developed, as if this was meant for 10 episodes and hours of plot was left on the cutting room floor. And the lack of any sinister villain really leaves no lasting impact. The murder mystery ended up being done by characters we knew nothing about that hadn’t been in the show since the first episode. There were countless supernatural aspects that led to nothing. And the end pretty much romanticizes the suicide of the mentally ill. Horrible season
Its kinda funny how script writers/studio execs these days are more obsessed with race than Houston Steward Chamberlain
Literally the only piece of detective work that was done by the main characters this entire season was checking the hatch of the ice cave entrance for prints. After which the entire story was explained to them in great detail by other characters. Any other shred of evidence or police work was done by Pete, who got cucked into killing his dad after he was kicked out of his house by his wife for working late on a multiple homicide for less than two weeks, or by Qavik who found the only person of interest and inflicted them of what the spiral meant. The same spiral that was very heavy handedly used by the marketing team to ensure people who liked season 1 would even watch an episode of season 4. Even the season 5 announcement used the spiral. People praise the “setting” of this show, it was filmed in Iceland, with fake snow and ice. In fact you only see a characters breath outside twice this entire season, and one of those times it’s CGI. This season had poor writing, poor execution, poor dialogue, and characters that were entirely unlikable. Danvers is a racist, abusive, philandering piece of shit, and Navarros whole gimmick is that she has hereditary schizophrenia and she can fight grown men. Also, how does a uniformed officer pass a psyche eval with schizophrenia and get to keep her facial piercings while on duty?
It's strange to discuss how you watched do the right thing during George Floyd to talk about how timeless it is, but don't see how connecting this show to him still falls in the same category as timelessness within american history. George Floyd is relevant to you now so this feels post-Floyd and dating itself, but protesting against police brutality has been around since the police were formed. So your critique of that part of this season feels tone deaf to me
The only True Detective is season one.
The second season was comedy. Not sure what everyone expected. There will never be another season like season 1 and even that jumped the shark a bit.
Jesus get over it.
No payoffs to all the setups. Bummer.
Great video. It was never a terrible show or anything, just mediocre. Frustrating to see it at a 92 on RT but it’s not the first time a virtue signaling script won praise by the critics.
Thanks
Before watching this here is my two cents on True Detective. After the first season when it was announced a second season would be ready to go by summer i thought that was an insanely short time frame considering it took Nick Pizollato over ten years to get the first season is game shape. I remember after the first episode of the second season thinking how it felt like a first draft with Vince Vaughn working hard to make lemonade out of crab apples. This to me was the worst decision Nick could have made. It was arrogant and delusional…..i dont think this show recovered from that decision.
am i the only one who thinks that matthew mcconaughey is the real hero of season 1? you can take the exact same story with the exact same character arcs but just change the actor for rustin cohle and it's nowhere near as captivating as matthew's. usually, great shows and movies are successful because of the writing quality, but in the case of season 1 TD, i find that nic p's writing only plays second fiddle to matthew's performance of the role. it's more a character study than it is a plot-driven story. obviously, the writing quality matters, but i highly doubt it would have reached the same meteoric critical praise without matthew m's performance. i watched somewhere that the actor actually wrote something like 300 pages worth of material just to prepare himself to play the role of rust. i think he isn't credited enough as to the fleshing out of rust's cohle's character development.
Nick is not the one who took the decision of airing season 2 so soon... HBO did. One of the HBO exec even apologized for that and that's why s3 aired much later.
I have an idea:
How about they stop releasing True Detective seasons? It worked as a mini series, it can just stop. Is as if they want to match the bad writing of Game of Thrones S7 & S8 with each new season.
Im sorry , season 4 is awful , boring , cringe . Full garbage !
there is one one true season of true detective, the rest of the seasons are like the jarhead sequels, not even related or supposed to be a true sequel to the original...
As a professional actor and a fan of Jodie Foster, I judge the acting to be incredibly poor. I've never seen Jodie worse and the support case were hopeless. Particularly noteworthy is the other lead actress, appalling!
It is an abomination. Can anyone explain the trailer they find to me full of sculpture/art that beckons back to S1? I don't believe this was ever explained at all.
All the hate for S4, at least I'll remember it unlike S3 or to be honest S2 apart from who was in it.
The writer of this has no concept of crime, drama, evidence, tension, human interaction, or set up/pay off.
The people who made this should be embarrassed. This is a school project, not a serious show.
Fair criticisms, Taylor. I wanted to like this season so much, but they lost me with the last two episodes of this season. As you said, this was extremely mediocre. Great video
Wōmen
True Detective Season 1 - masterful lightning in a bottle. Excellent writing, plotting, pacing, dialogue, mythology, and acting.
True Detective Season 2 - convoluted and confusing with too many subplots and minor characters, but ultimately bearing the TD universe DNA, and the story is interesting.
Season 3 - return to season 1 form. Interesting characters and story, dialogue was believable and story was mysterious.
Season 4 - this doesnt feel like True Detective honestly. Too much agenda and not enough story. Dialogue was stilted, poor writing, plotting wasn't tight, no true mythology in the story, just a lot if lifting of ideas from season 1. Love(d) Jodi Foster, excellent actor, probably the best thing about this season, but that's it. It's too bad. I think season 4 has probably assassinated the True Detective franchise.
1:16 Why....Why did they call it *_'NlGHT CUNTRY'_* *(???)*
I enjoyed the first few episodes actually really enjoyed them. It kinda fell apart unfortunately. I thought the setting was pretty sweet though very 30 days of night. I really thought it was going to go full lovecraftian horror with all those bodies together. Unfortunate how it ended up being just a bleh story. Could have been an awesome cosmic horror.
In the end, the Yellow Queens tortured the True Detectives to death with Woke. RIP
True Detective never managed to keep the quality of the first season. Compare this to Fargo TV show that have at least 3 excelent seasons, one average and one kinda bad, but even that bad fourth season of Fargo is a masterpiece compared to this.
All time bad season of television. Just f’ing terrible
TD Season 1= Masterpiece, TD Season 2 = Enjoyable, although not as good as Season 1, TD Season 3 = Very lacking in the writing department (not even Mahershala Ali could save that show, and he was great in it), but watchable, TD Season 4 = Utter non-sensical woke crap; avoid it like the plague if you enjoyed any of the previous seasons.
No way, man. Season 3 is great, especially compared to the unwatchable trainwreck of season 2.
@@clanofclams2720I think season 2 is the best season of the show. 1 is good. 3 is ok. I can't speak on 4 because I haven't seen it.
@@chubbs_tubby3360 that's hilarious.