True detective is back. Wait. what is True detective?
It’s been almost 10 years since HBO introduced audiences True detective in January 2014. A TV show with such a silly name that it absolutely had The first season of creator Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology drama was striking as it starred a resurgent Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in a crime thriller with an eerie weird-fiction subtext and a All-timer title sequence.
Consecutive seasons of True detective was not a sensation like his award-winning first. After a heavily delayed third season arrived in 2019, the series was effectively put on hold and Pizzolatto’s working relationship with HBO ended (while another at FX couldn’t even pick up
However, HBO still believes in the magic of that first season to squeeze some juice into a new episode. While it’s probably meant to be stand alone like others True detective seasons, land of night — starring Jodie Foster as Detective Liz Danvers and Kali Reis as her reluctant partner Detective Evangeline Navarro on the hunt for men missing from an arctic research station – is definitely trying to win back fans.
The trailer for True Detective: Land of the Night is full of callbacks to Season 1, structural (a cop is questioned on a harrowing case), stylistic (gloomy and somber wide-angle shots with hints of the supernatural), and lyrical (the spooky spiral from Season 1 is back).
The trailer works hard to make those connections extremely obvious — the spiral was a bit of Lovecraftian symbolism, representing the crime ring that season one’s protagonists Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Harrelson) track down together. The spiral was also summoned in Season 3, which itself was an attempt to return to the show’s roots after a hugely unpopular second season.
But online, viewers of the trailer also noticed that there could be more land of the night‘s Season 1 Connections as Spooky Symbolism: The Story Takes Place in Alaska, and in Season 1’s Fourth Episode “who goes thereRust Cohle claims he went there to visit a dying father who no one can confirm was ever there.
Little treats like this are what was made True detective a Hit: At first glance it was a seedy crime drama, but it was Also one built for the fan theory era, interspersed with ominous references to weird fiction works such as Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 work the king in yellow which, depending on your point of view, enriched the series or ultimately turned out to be a waste of time.
That’s what everyone, from HBO to regular fans, hopes for at the end of the day True Detective: Land of the Night delivers: A compelling mystery to speculate and brood over each image. Hopefully showrunner Issa López and producer Barry Jenkins will find that magic again. Yellow jackets can’t do everything alone.
True Detective: Land of the Night will premiere on HBO and stream on Max “later this year”.
