Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a magnetic performer at the center of it all, namely Mahershala Ali. (A question for further study: is Pizzolato a Weezer fan?)īased on these first two episodes, that strategy is working pretty well. If season one was the stunning debut album and season two the alienating second-album experiment that didn’t quite work out but inspired passionate defenders, season three plays - at least in these first two episodes - like a band trying to remind fans why they fell in love with them in the first place. Season three looks and feels a lot like season one, trading Louisiana for Arkansas but similarly unfolding a disturbing mystery across several interrogation-heavy timelines in the American South.

Now, over three years after it aired its second-season finale, True Detective is back, returning to a much-changed TV landscape in which it almost seems like a throwback. Its convoluted tale of sex, violence, repression, and introspective gangsters in Southern California didn’t capture the public imagination in quite the same way (though it did inspire seemingly countless “ in defense of …” pieces.) Just two seasons in, True Detective looked to have run its course.īut, as anyone who’s seen the previous seasons of the show already knows, the past never really dies. The second season, on the other hand, had a much rougher time. It also benefited from being - its excesses and slightly unsatisfying finale aside - quite good, mixing an unnerving, supernaturally-tinged mystery with beery philosophizing and stylish direction by Cary Fukunaga.

The first season, which aired in 2014, had benefited from a few converging trends: a sense that we were living in a golden age of prestige television and no one was creating TV of more importance than HBO a cultural taste for shows in which troubled heroes stared into the void of existence impassioned discussions of the series on social media and a renewed interest in all Matthew McConaughey–related matters. When True Detective wound down its second season in August 2015, it looked like we might have seen the last of the Nic Pizzolatto–created crime series - and that few would mind were that the case.

True detective season 1 synopsis