Review: True Detective returns to its brooding roots in a slow-burning third season

The first season of True Detective worked on a number of different levels simultaneously. The actual show, created by Nic Pizzolatto, and beautifully shot by Cary Fukunaga, stared Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as a pair of detectives investigating a series of grizzly murders in Louisiana. But what really drove interest in the show, apart from McConaughey’s bizarre monologues about space and time, were the rampant fan theories about who (or what) was truly behind the killings. With numerous allusions to Lovecraftian weird fiction (think of all The Yellow King pieces), the show trafficked in a sort of nihilism that truly inspired dread — what were these killings in the face of the unknowing power and horror of the cosmos at large?

That was a heady take, even for a prestige HBO show, and like Lost before it, the puzzle-box nature of True Detective eventually fizzled out towards the end, resulting in a finale that must rank with the last Sopranos episode as one of the most contentious season endings of all time.

Set up as an anthology series, the show returned for a much-maligned second season starring Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn, and the less said about that blunder the better.

Three years after that troubled second season comes the latest iteration of the series, starring Mahershala Ali as Detective Wayne Hays and Stephen Dorff as Detective West, who are tasked with investigating the murder of a young boy in the Ozarks in the 1980’s. This new season expands the dual timeline into three separate eras, inter-cutting between the 80’s, 90’s, and the current day. That structure allows for some creative storytelling devices, as the shows cuts between the timelines, revealing some fine makeup work as we see the two detectives aging across the decades. It also allows for the mysteries of the show to unfurl slowly, creating some true moments of tension as bits of information are carefully dribbled out to the audience.

Compounding the mysteries of the show is Hays’s struggle with a disease that affects his memory, providing us with an unreliable narrator to compound the purposefully oblique structure of the show. Much of this season is focused on memory — how, or what we remember, and how the grasp of those memories affects who we become as we move through life. Alongside the issues of memory is the theme of race — we never take for granted that the focus of the show is on a black detective investigating the murder of a young white boy, and how that setup plays amongst the rest of the police force and the small towns they operate in.

A Vietnam vet, Wayne Hays is a quiet presence, haunted by demons from his past than only become more distressing as the years go by and his memory begins to slip. Mahershala Ali plays him with an elegance and stoicism, rarely raising his voice above a muted whisper, which fits in perfect with the True Detective pantheon of great actors who seemingly mumble their way throughout an entire season. Thankfully, Ali does get the chance to stretch out from his tight-lipped performance in his scenes with Carmen Ejogo, playing a teacher (and eventual wife) who is writing a book based on the same murder he is investigating.

That investigation, while seemingly the basis for this season, almost seems like an after-thought for the show. There is obviously the question of who killed the young boy (and what happened to his sister who went missing at the same time), but the creators never sees to make it the focus of the show, at least in the first five episodes of the season that HBO made available for review. There is the bereaved father (Scoot McNairy), struggling to deal with his unimaginable loss, another vet (Michael Greyeyes), who arouses suspicion amongst the locals by biking through town and collecting junk, and a gang of teenage metalheads who come under scrutiny for their love of “satanic” music.

The parallels to the West Memphis 3 case are definitely there, but the crew of teenagers don’t make up the bulk of what we see in these first five episodes. The teenagers are one piece of a larger puzzle, but there’s no true sense of any kind of “satanic panic” gripping the town, which is interesting, given that it could have easily tied in with the otherworldly elements of the first season. If anything, not embracing the potentially supernatural elements this time shows that Nic Pizzolatto isn’t interested in simply repackaging the magic of that beloved first season, but in forging something new from that basic structure.

With a number of strong performances, and a team of great directors behind the helm (including Green Room‘s Jeremy Saulnier and Daniel Sackheim), this season of True Detective is off to a solid start, even if it seems unlikely to reach the levels of fevered devotion and fan-theories that greeted the initial season. Audiences won’t have to troll through Wikipedia entries on weird fiction to enjoy this season — what we’re presented with is already captivating enough to keep us invested.

True Detective airs Sundays on HBO.