Tonight’s episode was absolutely stuffed with plot points, pretzel-like twists and some seriously overripe, laugh-out-loud lines. More often than not, it felt like a parody of prestige drama rather than the real thing. No character got away clean: Not Ani, who suffers her way from the most one-dimensionally grotesque sex-harassment workshop ever before revving her fellow offenders’ engines with (presumably) sarcastic talk about big dicks. Not Paul and his ridiculous cliché of a mother, who scream and weep their lungs out when he finds out she stole his hidden loot from Afghanistan like they were in a bad telenovela. (Apparently someone in the writers’ room thinks “poisoned cooze” is an insult a human being would use in the year of our Lord 2015.) Not Ray, who records a monologue about suffering for his son — “Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted” — like he’s auditioning for the role of Rust Cohle in the school play. (Runner up: his big cliffhanger-ending “You and me need to talk.” No shit!) Not Frank and his wife Jordan, who stammer their way through a fight about his return to the gangster lifestyle and her inability to have children centered on sentences like “Crime exists contingent on human desire.”

The pièce de résistance, of course, is Frank’s grand declaration of frustration to Ray. “The enemy won’t reveal itself, Raymond,” he says, like a summer-stock Pacino in Godfather III. “Stymies my retribution. It’s like, uh, blue balls in your heart.” Blue balls in your heart, people. Blue. Balls. In. Your. Heart. Look, a simile makes connections in order to uncover meaning, not overwhelm it; “blue balls in your heart” does nothing to explain the unique rage of delayed revenge except bury it under a mountain of “Wait…what the hell did he just say?” It’s enough to give you, uh, jock itch in your brain.

I don’t even know what to say, folks. I reviewed tonight’s True Detective for Rolling Stone.

Structurally, tonight’s big bang comes at the exact same end-of-Episode-Four point as the single-take shootout from Season One. But that was a deep-cover diversion, a consequence of Rust Cohle getting dragged along for a drug heist while posing as a white-supremacist biker. This week’s rampage, by contrast, took place as part of the search for the actual suspect in Ben Caspere’s killing, a figure in the Mexican mob whose prints were on the dead man’s pawned watch.

As such, it potentially corresponds not to the aforementioned seven-minute sequence, but to Marty and Rust’s raid on Reggie Ledoux’s compound in the following episode. That was when the original Detective duo murdered numerous shady men while the real killer went free for another decade. This time around, Ray knows for sure that the Vinci P.D. wants the case closed, and he suspects the state is in for the opportunity to shake down his crooked town for extra cash. With that in mind, it’s likely there will be pressure to act like they’ve gotten their man, however improbably that may be. Only ganglord Frank, who knows better than to believe that a guy hard up enough to pawn jewelry could be behind all his ruined plans, will want to keep up the hunt until the actual culprit is found. In other words, the criminal has been the true detective all along. Congrats if you had him in your office pool!

I reviewed tonight’s bullet-ridden True Detective for Rolling Stone.

…this isn’t the first time True Detective has lacked the courage of its convictions. Rust Cohle spent the first season spouting the bleakest arguments about life and death ever advanced by a primetime drama, only to see the light and put his pessimism aside in its final minutes. The show could have broken important ground, depicting a person who believes the worst about the world yet still does good in it, with neither feature canceling out the other. (Faith in humanity is not required to be a decent human being.) Instead, Rust played the hero and got a hero’s reward, psychologically anyway.

Reviving Ray leaves similarly challenging and exciting territory unexplored. The idea of a good-cop/bad-cop narrative forced to live on past the death of its bad cop is an intriguing one indeed. For starters, it would have shaken up the story’s seen-it-all-before structure. It could also have been an opportunity for Pizzolatto and company to examine the toxic masculinity the show alternately (and perhaps unwittingly) critiques and embodies. Dodging an entire seasons’ worth of comparisons between the Harrelson/McConaughey and Farrell/Vaughn stunt castings wouldn’t have hurt, either.

And while we’re playing the What If game: If Velcoro were gone, maybe there’d be room to signify the psychological hang-ups of the other characters outside of bedroom-related problems. Take the trio that rounds out the core cast: Ani Bezzerides’ sexual assertiveness, Frank Semyon’s failure to perform at the fertility clinic, and Paul Woodrugh’s physical rejection of a romantic overture are used to advertise their overall dysfunction like a neon sign. Pimps and prostitutes are everywhere, each one a more leering stereotype than the last. Hollywood types talk about risqué parties like middle-schoolers who just looked up the word “orgy” on wiktionary.com for the first time. The evil mayor has a house full of hustlers and harlots, including his son and wife. The murder victim himself is a garden-variety perv. Factor in Marty Hart’s philandering, his teen daughter’s promiscuity, and his wife’s weaponized seduction of Rust back in Season One, and it’s as if True Detective believes anything short of having seamless, zipless sexual experiences is a signal that your life is about to fall apart.

“Death is not the end,” but maybe it should be? I reviewed tonight’s kind of baffling True Detective for Rolling Stone.

Let’s get a little Rust Cohle-ish for a second: There’s a theory among physicists that any event with multiple possible outcomes is essentially a root from which parallel universes grow. If you’re reading this recap, for example, you probably decided to watch True Detective tonight — instead of, say, playing World of Warcraft, or writing to your congressional representative about the cancellation of Hannibal. But according to the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics, the timelines in which you leveled up your orc mage or explained the twisted relationship between Dr. Lecter and Special Agent Will Graham to a member of the House Ways and Means Committee are just as real as this one.

Tonight, True Detective 2.0 itself reached a multiversal branch point. Either it killed off its top-billed main character in its second episode, thus crafting the quickest course correction in TV history, or it didn’t, creating one of the most obnoxious bait-and-switch cliffhangers ever. This makes Colin Farrell the TV-antihero version of Schrödinger’s cat — simultaneously alive and dead, at least until next week. Time may be a flat circle, but it’s sure-as-shit better to be on one side of the interdimensional disc than the other.

Did True Detective just do what it looked like it did? And does it matter? I tried to answer these questions for Rolling Stone.

There’s a lot to think about in Alice Bolin’s essay “The Oldest Story: Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show” in the Los Angeles Review of Books. What starts as an insightful and often bleakly witty look at the strengths and weaknesses of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective falters when it unfairly conflates that entertaining but very deeply flawed show with David Lynch & Mark Frost’s vastly superior Twin Peaks.

“Just as for the murderers,” Bolin writes, “for the detectives in True Detective and Twin Peaks, the victim’s body is a neutral arena on which to work out male problems.” For True Detective this is, well, true. For all the show’s gestures in the direction of excoriating predation upon the less powerful by the more powerful, usually meaning upon girls by men, it’s ultimately a show that erased the very victims it purported to care for. The emotions of the male cops were our only window on their personhood and suffering.

By contrast, Twin Peaks brought us where Laura Palmer lived and forced us to keep looking at how she felt there. Indeed, Lynch made an entire prequel film for precisely that purpose (one that gives lie to the Bolin’s claim elsewhere in the essay that death prevents the Dead Girl from claiming the redemption available to the living males who investigate her death, but that’s neither here nor there). Unlike True Detective, where we as viewers are never separated from the focalizing influence of Marty, Rust, the two cops investigating them, and eventually the killer, the experiences of Laura, Maddy, and Donna were central to Twin Peaks, allowed to stand on their own, and devastating as such. Asseriting that “in Twin Peaks…the central characters are male authority figures” participates in the precise erasure the essay is decrying.

Moreover, the show worked rigorously to de-glamourize its presentation of rape and abuse. Even in the more explicit prequel film Fire Walk With Me, the sexual activities Laura initiates, though shown to be in some way sexy to her, are so because they represent crude and damaged attempts to reassert sexual agency in the face of years of horrific rape and abuse. Our glimpses of the actual rapes and assaults that take place are heartbreaking, soundtracked by screaming and sobs. The fallout for Laura, for her female classmates, for her mother — these are all chronicled unsparingly. This, and the unique and unforgivable violation represented by the identity of the killer, are what the show is about; the uncanny imagery and stunning filmmaking are intended to charge those elements, not the other way around.

Bolin also badly misreads the role of the supernatural on Twin Peaks — not just the Black Lodge and its murderous entities specifically but, I think, the nature and function of monsters in horror fiction generally. Citing the role of the demonic Bob in Laura’s murder, Bolin writes, “Externalizing the impulse to prey on young woman cleverly depicts it as both inevitable and beyond the control of men.” As evidence she cites a statement Agent Cooper makes to Sheriff Truman that the existence of supernatural evil beggars belief no more than the existence of the very human evil it helped enable. But in context, that line is intended to drive home the horror of wholly human abuse, not dismiss it. For one thing, countless male characters in Twin Peaks — Bobby, Leo, Ben Horne, the Renault brothers, Dr. Jacoby, the faraway editors of Flesh World — required no supernatural intervention whatsoever to commit their exploitative and misogynistic actions.

For another, monsters have since the dawn of time represented not just external but internal fears, our terror not just of the outside and unknown but of the impulses and excesses of mind and body we know all too well, because those minds and bodies are our own. I believe the idea that the killer bears no complicity for the killings because of the role of the supernatural isn’t even borne out by the text, but even if it were, the supernatural is not there to let male viewers off the hook in terms of their contemplation of the simultaneously universal and individualized nature of misogyny. It’s there to embody it.

The essay concludes by unfavorably comparing TD and TP to the more recent “Dead Girl show” Pretty Little Liars. It concludes:

What would seem to be Pretty Little Liars’s worst faults — its unwieldy plot, its lack of consistency, the culpability of so many characters — are actually instructive. Its creators have made a Dead Girl Show that is not about a journey instigated by a Dead Girl body toward existential knowledge, but the mess, the calamity, and the obscurity that are the consequences of misogyny.

This, of course, is an excellent description of Twin Peaks.

I wrote up 16 of the New Golden Age of TV’s most surprising and suspenseful scenes and sequences for Rolling Stone (with a little help from my fabulous editor David Fear). Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Deadwood, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Lost, Mad Men, Orange Is the New Black, The Shield, The Sopranos, True Detective, Twin Peaks, The Walking Dead, The Wire. Read, then vote in our neat bracket tournament thing!

Just realized I never linked to my review of the True Detective season finale. Fittingly it was a mix of “gripping” and “a mess,” like the whole season.

My own wild speculation is that clue-hunting and twist-anticipating entered the hive mind via cinemas in 1999 with the one-two twist-ending punch of The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. Sure, The Crying Game was still a recent memory, but not for the fanboys who flocked to Shyamalan and Fincher’s films and whose tastes were about to become post-millennial mainstream culture’s bread and butter. On the small screen, the phenomenon had its precursors — “Who killed Laura Palmer?”, The X-Files’ sprawling and eventually suffocating mythology — but the blame-slash-credit must be laid at the four-toed feet of Lost. Fueled by decades of pulp-fiction tropes and pop-philosophy mindbenders, structured as a Russian nesting doll of mysteries within mysteries, and riddled with more Easter eggs than the White House lawn, ABC’s sci-fi smash knowingly worked fans into a frenzy of message-board theory-mongering. Turns out it was more or less a shaggy dog story the creators were making up as they went along, but this didn’t stop viewers from applying this mode of audience speculation-cum-participation to virtually every big series since.

Which is fair play, when the show in question invites it. For example, Lost’s big nerd-culture contemporary, the cult-classic critics’ darling Battlestar Galactica reboot, teased its big mysteries in the opening-credit text of every episode, and thus had nothing but itself to blame when viewers gave the whole series a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on those mysteries’ solutions. But even relatively realistic shows, based not around unraveling enigmas but on studying the complexities of human relationships, are now treated like glorified Sudoku puzzles by vocal viewers. The Sopranos’ David Chase worked overtime to design a series finale that would actively defy this kind of clue-hunting closure, but that didn’t stop a host of amateur sleuths out to close the book on that infamously open ending. More recently, the ostensibly sophisticated audience of Mad Men treats everything from promo art to costume choices the way medieval soothsayers treated goat entrails. In this light, the decision of Game of Thrones to largely drop its epic-fantasy source material’s host of cryptic prophecies and hidden truths (google “R+L=J” if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes) in favor of character work and realpolitik seems like the smartest act of adaptation since Francis Ford Coppola dropped Johnny Fontane as a main character in The Godfather.

Over at Esquire, I wrote a piece on the fan fervor for theory-mongering that surrounds True Detective which wound up being kind of an historical overview of the practice’s slow takeover of pop culture. It was fun to do — and commissioned by a loyal All Leather Must Be Boiled reader! See kids, tumblr dreams come true!

I reviewed last night’s fine, haunting True Detective for Rolling Stone, and just for fun I included some dreams I’ve had about the show.

Where do you think Cohle and Hart fit within the world of HBO’s antiheroes?

I don’t think either of these guys are antiheroes. I see that term used a lot in the media but I don’t think they know what they means. Tony Soprano wasn’t an antihero, he was just a very bad man. He’s just somebody you’re fascinated with watching. I think both of these men are straight up heroes — they’re flawed men but they’re not corrupt. They’re kind of throwbacks, for better or worse, to a different kind of masculinity. They’re real men.

—True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto

lol

Time is a flat episode: I reviewed this week’s not-so-good True Detective for Rolling Stone.

I reviewed last weekend’s True Detective for Rolling Stone. I thought it was the best episode yet, comfortably so.

I reviewed this week’s episode of True Detective particularly that bravura closing sequence, for Rolling Stone. I still think this thing’s mad corny, but it’s certainly well made.

You know, gang, the dialogue on this show is…less than good. A lot of it is just lame hardboiled cop-show clichés: “Nothin’ is ever over,” “The world needs bad men — we keep the other bad men from the door,” I mean, jesus. The interpersonal stuff is weak too: “Why is there all this space between us, Marty?” Ohhhhh, brother. (That was almost made up for by Marty’s Oscar-worthy performance with his Wile E. Coyote metaphor, but then rapidly undone by a deeply unimaginative sex scene.) It feels like the role of dialogue on formative Great-TV shows The Wire and Deadwood — the way David Simon and David Milch developed their own rhythm and syntax and idioms to have their characters communicate their complicated ideas about and reactions to the dissolution and formation of communities respectively, Simon with simplicity and Milch with filigrees — has been forgotten. Shows that do self-consciously formal, even purple dialogue well, like Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey…that just doesn’t get acknowledged as best I can tell. But this thing, with lines like “I don’t think a man can love” or the college-dorm-room exchange about the impact of religious faith on morality or that whole let’s-repeat-the-double-entendre-twelve-times-just-in-case “I just don’t ever want you mowin’ my lawn” argument, is some weird critical cause célèbre. I have nothing but contempt for writing wherein I set myself up in opposition to other critics, but, like…what the heck, man.

That softness seeps into other aspects of the writing, too. When Marty revealed that Rust, on top of his entire library card-catalog of baleful backstory and character traits, also has synesthesia, I actually laughed out loud. Perhaps it’s supposed to feel ridiculous? And when Rust outlined his findings about their killer’s past crime to Marty, why would he save “the victims had the same spiral mark on their back” for last? Wouldn’t that be the first thing you showed, if you weren’t a character in a cop show building to a dramatic reveal? Even Rust’s nihilism, which is so extravagant it retains a certain vim and vigor even at its silliest, is undercut in this episode by the heavy-handed and shopworn decision to juxtapose his grim proclamations about how murder victims are ultimately happy to die with line-dancing flashbacks. (Which is a damn shame, because the idea of a person becoming a homicide detective out of curiosity as to the precise nature of the cessation of consciousness’ link to the physical body is novel and compelling.)

So how best to enjoy this thing? The final shot — that genuinely frightening slow-motion monstrosity — is the answer. True Detective is best approached and appreciated as a creepy potboiler, with some fun performances. (Give it up for Eli from Boardwalk Empire! Remus, too, by the way — he was the guy on the riding mower.) It’s got a fancier pedigree, but in this regard it’s not a world away from another not-quite-sure-I-get-the-buzz show, The Americans. A great show? Don’t get it twisted. A fun show, if you don’t mind staring at it in wry bemusement, Marty-to-Rust-style? Sure, why not.

PS:

On the list of True Detective‘s influences and inspirations, I’m guessing This Is Spinal Tap doesn’t even crack the top 200. I mean, the mother of all mockumentaries presents occultism and alcoholism as basically awesome instead of corrosive to the soul, and nobody dies a horrible untimely death. (Well, unless you count the drummers, and it’s not like the band does.) Yet in watching this second episode of HBO’s instant-hit crime drama, two quotes from Tap played on a constant loop in my head. (And no, despite Alexandra Daddario’s nude scene, neither was from “Sex Farm.”)

The first comes when the band is presented with the heavily censored album cover for their magnum opus Smell the Glove: “There’s something about this that’s so black,” says guitarist/philospher Nigel Tufnel, “it’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.” That sentiment is inescapable practically every time Matthew McConaughey’s depressive Detective Rust Cohle opens his mouth – never more so than when he explains to Gilbough and Papania, the detectives interviewing him about a mysterious copycat killing in the present day, the lessons he took from the death of his two-year-old daughter. “I think of the hubris it must take to yank a soul out of nonexistence into this…meat. To force a life into this thresher. As to my daughter, she spared me the sin of being a father.” This is the most profoundly nihilistic TV-drama dialogue since the starmaking debut of Richard Harrow on HBO’s frequently equally bleak Boardwalk Empire, during which he explained to his newfound friend Jimmy Darmody how the trenches of World War I cured him of his love of reading: “It occurred to me: the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.”

What’s more, Rust has just revealed that his history as a cop involves committing murder — the execution of a junkie who’d dosed his infant with crystal meth, a killing that doomed Rust to a lengthy deep-cover narco stint, a shooting, and the psych ward. It was only calling in the various favors owed him by Texas police – no doubt for other, undisclosed dirty deeds on their behalf – that enabled him to secure a supposedly sanity-preserving gig as a homicide detective here in Louisiana. Cohle even got some visually stunning acid flashbacks and hallucinations as a parting gift. Dude makes Vic Mackey look like Joe Friday.

Which is where the second quote comes in: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” C’mon, True Detective, you’re laying it on a little thick here, aren’t you? Rust’s an alcoholic insomniac pill-popping flash-backing divorced institutionalized murderer with a dead daughter? Was there some kind of “sad backstory bingo” being played in the writers’ room? And was it played before or after the round involving cop-show clichés? If the angry captain, the disapproving father-in-law, and the hooker with a heart of gold had a single line of dialogue between them you couldn’t predict a split-second before they said it, like Bill Murray playing Jeopardy! in Groundhog Day, you may want to have some neurological testing done.

And it’s not like Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart fares a whole lot better. About the only thing saving his adultery storyline from the seen-it-all-before file is how berserk over-the-top it gets, from a nude scene that feels gloriously gratuitous even when Daddario’s character Lisa is still wearing her polo shirt to a locker-room confrontation in which Cohle threatens to break his hands during a dispute over the precise odor of the vaginal secretions on his face. Even the case itself, with its big, Hollywoodified crime scenes and Gothy defaced churches, comes across like something you’d see in a ho-hum Batman comic trying too hard to be creepy.

Yet in much the same way that Marty keeps telling his interrogators that Rust, for all his faults and quirks, was still a damn good detective, there’s something that seems solid under True Detective‘s bleak bluster. For one thing, its pacing is downright perverse, and I mean that in the best way. We don’t find out about Rust’s bloody record as some big last-minute reveal – he just drops it in casually about halfway through the episode, in an interrogation scene we’re witnessing through a videocamera. Similarly, we know all sorts of things about how the 1995 case plays out – they rescue a bunch of girls in the woods, they catch the killer, they work happily as partners for another seven years – that your average show would treat like season-ending payoffs. By continuously telling us where it’s going, way way before we’d expect to find out, True Detective ironically makes itself much tougher to predict.

Then there are the character dynamics around which you’d expect a show with the star power of McConaughey and Harrelson to revolve – subtle, sharp, and engaging. One moment, Marty can shake his head in disbelief and disgust over Rust saying he has no idea whether his own mother is alive; the next, he can react with genuine sympathy and sadness when he finds out Rust lost his daughter in a car accident, a trauma he triggered by obliviously inviting the guy over for a family dinner. You can see  the roots of their solid partnership and its eventual dissolution.

Writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga are also quietly telegraphing the team’s relative effectiveness as cops. Today, Marty seems much more together than Rust – he’s a blowhard, yeah, but he stuck with the system and rode it into a successful retirement, and he’s being given star treatment as a witness while Rust’s relegated to some wood-paneled file room. But take note: Marty’s a full episode behind his former partner in figuring out that the detectives interrogating them are trying to “jam someone up.” He also seems not to be fully aware some of Rust’s dark spots: “Rust had about as sharp an eye for weakness as I’ve ever seen,” Marty relates, which is true as far as it goes, but a funny thing to say about a guy who’ll get information out of people by beating them with toolboxes. That’s a weakness, I guess, sure!

Of course, it’s also possible Marty’s covering up for Rust, trying to pull one over on Gilbough and Papania – which leads to a mystery I’m more intrigued by than the Yellow King and his antler-wearing victims. In a series called True Detective, which is so far delving hella deep into the foibles of the two cops who could conceivably be its title character, is a similar dynamic going to play out between the two detectives who are working their case in the here and now? Do either of these guys carry with them secrets like Rust’s, resentments like Marty’s? Do any of the four have anything to do with the killings they’re all ostensibly trying to solve? Throw in a slight but palpable sense of the hurricanes that have haunted the region (Rita destroyed the original casefiles; Andrew shut down the school where a missing girl once went), and a series of striking visuals (a night drive that wouldn’t look out of place in a Ryan Gosling movie; a contrast between the burned-out church and the birds, trains, and clouds that keep on gliding past it, leaving its sins hidden) and the blend’s still a heady one. Maybe that angry captain had it right: I’ll give True Detective a few more weeks, but goddammit, they’d better deliever.

I reviewed the series premiere of HBO’s new anthology-format crime drama True Detective for Rolling Stone. It’s the Spin̈al Tap album cover of hourlong quality dramas — NONE MORE BLACK — but Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are awfully watchable in it. I’m not sure that’s enough at this point, but we’ll see.