True Detective: Night Country

Comics Will Break Your Heart

A short piece today on culture. Or, more pointedly, ‘Capital C’ culture. And a little bit of Free Speech.

Streaming giant MAX has released 3 episodes of ‘Must See Sunday TV’ with True Detective: Night Country. With Curb Your Enthusiasm entering its final season this weekend (we’ll recap each episode at CurbCast!), HBO has been a part of our Sunday night (or time-shifted) routine since The Sopranos. Deadwood, Rome, Oz, Veep, Succession, The Wire, Band of Brothers, to name a few. Stacey's favorite shows are Six Feet Under and Game of Thrones, but I haven't finished them yet.

In one of my earliest posts, I took on my unique visualization of time being a flat circle.

The latest True Detective Season 4: Night Country is a scary, creepy winter vision. This season is more aligned with Season 1 than the intermediate seasons are. Again, I have not finished 2 or 3, which drives me crazy to skip around like that, but as we say on LeaguePodcast, “We’ll Get There.” I immediately was looking forward to seeing Jodie Foster in something new. Last year, I was working on a show, and none other than her wife, Alexandra, was the video production person on the live podcast we were producing. Alexandra was so fantastic, and I didn’t even know ‘who she was’ until after I signed my location release.

Jodie is astounding in the show. There are no spoilers here, but another cop on the show was portrayed by G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra’s Destro and The Ninth Doctor by Christopher Eccleston. He’s unrecognizable to me here, primarily because of his American cop accent, and he looks a bit like Michael Rapaport these days.

Native American actor and professional boxer Kali Reis is the co-lead with Foster and is delivering one of the best tough-as-nails female lead cop performances I’ve ever come across. Plus, she’s a New Englander. They even work in a line about a Boston accent in Episode 3. The completionist is again checking in. She has only been in a few projects, and I’m compelled to follow her career and backtrack to her 2021 debut in Catch the Fair One.

“Comics Will Break Your Heart”

The indelible Jack Kirby quote will apply here. Let me explain. Issa López, the showrunner and director for Season 4, responded to series creator Nic Pizzolatto’s criticism of her season (Esquire). And here I am in true 2024 newsletter fashion, reacting to the response of the response. What is media, anyway?

First, after being a creator myself and seeing projects taken over by others that are now ‘out of my hands,’ I get what Pizzolatto has to say about his vision taking a turn. And he can not like it all he wants. And, once more, can feel free to take to interviews and social media criticizing and even panning if he so chooses the direction, show, art, or cinematography of the path HBO has taken with his original idea. He can even be so upset that he can decline money from his Executive Producer paycheck and donate it to some cause.

He can even be ‘kind of a dick’ about it—

I certainly did not have any input on this story or anything else. Can't blame me.

See Alan Moore and Watchmen, After-Watchmen, and the acclaimed Watchmen television series on HBO. Moore doesn’t even take the paycheck.

To be clear, I don’t see Warner Bros. or HBO as a bad guy here. I have become a big fan of the ‘multiverse’ they pioneered, going back to Batman ‘89, Batman: The Animated Series, and the Nolan films running alongside different animated takes on The Caped Crusader since. After all, what is Batman without 85 years of iterative storytelling?

López, through art direction and storytelling, is reinterpreting the vision.

Here is her response over at Vulture.

I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them. That’s his prerogative. I wrote this with profound love for the work he made and love for the people that loved it. And it is a reinvention, and it is different, and it’s done with the idea of sitting down around the fire, and [let’s] have some fun and have some feelings and have some thoughts. And anybody that wants to join is welcome.

Back in my Yellow King (True Detective Season 1) Reddit days, I would scour for clues and had my own flawed and inaccurate takes on the mystery from clues in the show. López, writing in the lockdown, has an incredible opening sequence to the latest season, ‘from and inspired by’ Grammy-Award winning artist Billie Eilish’s spooky hit “Bury A Friend”.

There may be more than just clues in the opening sequence.

So I just hope she doesn’t call me wanting some writing credit,” López told IndieWire.

Speaking of music, Charley Crockett’s “Black Sedan” is featured in the first episode. I could sing along to every lyric to my partner’s delight (chagrin)!

Unlike most reactions, I’m not upset, mad, or even critical of what Nic Pizzolatto had to say. Preach it from the hilltop, brother! I would say, frankly, this season is a tribute to your work; you can feel it in the DNA, the sets, the rhyming shots. Perhaps a bit of grace on your part would embrace the reimagined vision and let the anthology series grow and become better art as the years go by. If we’re lucky enough to have 10 seasons of this, you might look a little corny if you go after each subsequent auteur taking on one of the best TV properties in years. Maybe Issa López will get another shot, or new talent will take the reigns.

Regenerate. Don’t return to it. Or come back yourself in Season 8. Be Doctor Who. Don’t be Law & Order: SVU. Did that rhyme? Too much Roadblock on the mind.