T.V. Review: True Detective: Night Country
Please Don’t Miscast Jodie Foster
Sometimes I come to a television series really wanting to like it, and I end up cutting the writers too much slack. I overlook bad dialogue, minor inconsistencies in the plot, stock efforts at character development, etc. Then the credits roll on the finale, and the hope of a turnaround evaporates, and I realize—alas!—the show was not very good.
This happened with True Detective: Night Country. I waded in having seen seasons one (excellent) and two (meh) and intrigued by the possibilities Nic Pizzolatto’s departure opened up. The promised setting—a remote Alaskan town in the Arctic Circle—also sparked cautious optimism: there were a lot of ways it could go wrong, but at a very basic level, it held intrigue, and it was a good match for the anthology’s established tone. For one, maybe two, episodes, Night Country held up (shakily) to expectations. Then everything collapsed.
Jodie Foster’s Casting
The series’ first mistake is casting Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers, one of the two lead detectives. Foster is an accomplished actress, one of superlative talent and with a resume to match. But her range has limits. David Fincher, who directed her in Panic Room, says, “Jodie Foster can play a lot of things. Stupid ain’t one of them.” Add to that: characters at war with themselves.
Liz Danvers is at war with herself and, consequently, a number of other characters too. She makes stupid, rash decisions and loses control of her emotions without understanding why. She yells a lot. It’s not very believable. No amount of time preparing for the part could overcome Foster’s innate smarts and bone-deep sangfroid. Sure, Liz Danvers might struggle to connect with her adopted daughter or understand the depth of Indigenous Alaskans’ political resentments, but Jodie Foster never would, and it is Foster whom we see on screen.
Nothing Makes Sense
The second (much bigger) mistake the series makes is throwing logic out the window. The sins here are too numerous to count—practically every important detail of the setting falls apart on cursory inspection. To begin with, Ennis, the town where the series takes place, has a population that varies between a couple hundred and a couple thousand people as the plot demands it. Sometimes we know every cop in town, and sometimes (most notably when riot police show up to quash a protest) there are fifteen or twenty faceless stormtroopers. Supposedly, half the town works in the mine, but we never meet that population. There are outlying villages in easy driving distance with substantial populations of their own (very much not a thing—remote Alaskan mining towns do not have suburbs or even roads to other places), and the Coast Guard patrols the local waters so vigilantly that the body is recovered within hours after a character crashes, alone and unobserved, through sea ice. There are year-round ice caves in the area, notwithstanding summer temperatures that reliably melt ice in northern Alaska.
Worse than all this, the motive for the murders—this is so stupid I’m not going to call it a spoiler—turns on a research station’s secret request that the local mine pump out more pollution because the pollution makes it easier to drill through permafrost. The researchers’ goal is to unearth an ancient organism, which I suppose must be immune to mine pollution. Seriously, someone got paid to write this. The pollution also taints the outlying villages’ drinking water, stirring political conflict, which—how, exactly does that happen? Water doesn’t flow in permafrost, and even if it did, it would freeze during the winter, and no one would rely on it for their water supply.
Bad Writing
Linked to the paucity of logic is old-fashioned bad writing. Pointless plotlines consume large chunks of runtime. (For example: a character falls victim to a romance scam, mopes about it, and promptly dies.) Dramatic moments hit the viewer with unbelievable regularity: practically every character goes through a family crisis over the course of something like two weeks. The show plays these moments up for all they’re worth, but most of them fall flat or (again) make no sense. Characters behave as the script demands, and the writers do scant work to show us a foundation for that behavior.
Just as troubling, no one does anything of consequence when it comes to the murder mystery portion of the plot. They bounce around from family drama to meaningless dream sequences, stumbling into plot points through dumb luck or help from friendly ghosts (I’m not kidding). Witnesses make cryptic statements that lead nowhere, then they vanish. Eventually, the writers get bored watching the characters play detective and hand them the answers. It’s a low point for a show that sells itself as a detective series.
Empty Homages to Season One
Season one of True Detective showed ambition, and for the most part it delivered. The violence, of both the raw and personal variety and the sinister background variety, felt grounded, as did the bleak and cynical tone. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were excellently cast, and their performances said much about the helplessness of angry masculinity. The simplicity of the plot, moreover, gave the show space to explore these themes. (Nic Pizzolatto says he deliberately wrote the murder mystery to be straightforward so he would have that space.) When a psychotic meth cook intones, “Time is a flat circle,” it feels congruent with the scenes presented—of trailer parks and overstuffed crumbling cottages on bayous that barely change in decades, of endless violence and corruption that rear their head in a thousand little jagged moments.
Characters in season four quote Nietzsche too, but only because the writers want to pay homage to season one. More generally, the writers try to establish a similar atmosphere to season one, with shadowy, implacable forces moving in the background, but it doesn’t work. Partly that’s because Ennis is an isolated town of at most five thousand people, and partly it’s because the plot makes no sense. Horror scenes intrude at random, and no thread holds them together beyond a general idea that things are vaguely weird in the Arctic Circle. And sure, maybe they are—but True Detective: Night Country provides no insight into how that weirdness haunts the people who live there, and no insight into why it should haunt the viewer, either.