It turns out that not everyone is a fan of True Detective: Night Country. Although the Jodie Foster/Kali Reis-led series has earned overwhelming praise from critics — True Detective Season 4 currently has a 93% Fresh critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the most feted installment of the HBO franchise thus far — the naysayers are everywhere. Decider’s own Sean T. Collins has called out the series for overemphasizing the mystical elements (as has Joyce Carol Oates), while some hardcore fans of the original 2014 run of True Detective have been mocking the superfluous Easter eggs cropping up in Season 4. The person who might be making the loudest of these complaints? None other than True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, who pointed slammed new showrunner Issa López’s take on the series as “so stupid.”
So do the True Detective Season 4 haters have a point? Has True Detective: Night Country lost its grip on reality? Is True Detective: Night Country really “so stupid” for peppering references to the critically-acclaimed first season throughout its run? More specifically: Was HBO dumb to shoehorn Issa López’s original idea for a murder mystery series set against polar night into the True Detective universe?
Watching the week-to-week reactions of True Detective: Night Country viewers has been fascinating to me, a critic who had to mainline most of the series in a single day all the way back in mid-December to meet, sigh, deadlines. Because I absorbed the full scope of López’s vision in basically one go, I never got to sit with a single episode’s questions, revelations, mysteries, or Easter eggs. Instead, I emerged from my binge-watch dazzled by how tidily López eventually wrapped up her chilly murder mystery plot.
I can’t address the concerns about True Detective: Night Country‘s obsession with the spiritual world without rushing headlong into massive spoilers. What I maybe — maybe? — can say is that all the True Detective Season 1 Easter eggs that fans have found aren’t nearly as interesting to me as how deftly López seeded all the clues to solving the mystery from the show’s earliest scenes. In fact, I keep wondering if the ghostly Travis Cohle (Erling Eliasson) or the return of the Tuttles are the’s show’s biggest missteps. It’s not that a ghost can’t emerge in the polar night to lead Rose (Fiona Shaw) to the murdered Tsalal scientists or a cruel, rich family shouldn’t be investing in an arctic research station…but that by connecting these flourishes to True Detective Season 1, HBO is distracting viewers from what’s working in Season 4.
Issa López has repeatedly told the press that she pitched True Detective: Night Country as a stand alone series to HBO, and that it was the HBO development execs who circled back and suggested her arctic murder mystery could be part of the True Detective anthology series.
“I did love the idea of creating, of making a line between the first three seasons and the comeback of the series,” López told Decider. “You know, I think that those three seasons are a unit and they come from the same writer and from the same mind.”
“We are going to revisit True Detective, but it’s a different incarnation of True Detective, from a different mind. So it’s not just True Detective Season 4, it’s True Detective: Night Country.”
Okay, but if you want to watch True Detective: Night Country on Max, you can only find it by seeking out True Detective Season 4, which speaks to the confusion that HBO and López have been fostering amongst fans. If True Detective: Night Country is truly its own thing, why shoehorn so many Easter eggs in? Why call it True Detective at all?
The answer is, of course, marketing. Network executives believe it’s easier to sell audiences on intellectual property, aka IP, they already know and like than something completely new. But if HBO’s hit Mare of Easttown flourished without a True Detective stamp, couldn’t Night Country have found its audience, too?
So much of the griping from critics of True Detective Season 4 — a not insignificant percentage of whom could be described as falling underneath “toxic masculinity” umbrella —seems to be focused on comparisons to the show’s beloved first season. HBO may have created false expectations for its audience by insisting that López’s work was a natural followup to Pizzolatto’s three seasons. López compounded these expectations by happily nodding to the original series whenever she liked.
What sticks to my craw is the knowledge that López has created an exceptional season of television that works better the less you bother with the True Detective Season 1 comparisons. Instead of letting the Mexican auteur’s creepy campfire tale unfold naturally, viewers are feverishly watching it as a companion piece to a different story. This could have been avoided had HBO trusted López’s vision to stand on its own. As it is, True Detective: Night Country is now as intertwined with the baggage of Pizzolatto’s True Detective run as Annie K’s murder is with the mystery that overtook the Tsalal Arctic Research Station.
