True Detective

It's punchy, violent, and darkly funny.

True Detective Season 2 may not be subtle ("this is my least favorite life," a performer mournfully sings at the Vinci bar.) But the actors provide enough light to make it worth navigating the gloom.

It may be impossible for it to strike TV lightning twice, but True Detective in its second iteration definitely has a charge.

It is a rock-solid crime drama with film caliber production values, intriguing plotting and great performances.

It’s still the kind of show that makes TV viewers reach for phrases like “golden age of television drama.”

It’s difficult to like or root for any of the four, making this one difficult watch. Still, creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto has a knack for storytelling and character development. Especially intriguing is Farrell.

Pizzolatto's writing is not without its irritations, particularly his dialogue.... Ultimately, the characters are too fascinating to turn loose of–particularly Farrell's explosive Velcoro and his political godfather Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn).

All of the lead actors dig deeply into their roles, with Farrell playing the wary, weary burnout to perfection, and Vaughn shifting into full-throttle intensity. The story is dark and atmospheric--just the way fans like it. Meanwhile, the first three episodes hint at enough buried secrets and fresh angles to indicate that the story still has a lot to give.

For now, my expectations are still high—probably too high for this show. But maybe you can’t truly hate True Detective unless you love it enough to let it disappoint you.

As the fine but far more dutiful early episodes of Season 2 suggest, if we're not careful, we'll get only the television we deserve.

True Detective is monochromatic and self-serious, but it builds suspense with finesse and has a keen appreciation for the poetry of political corruption and urban decay. That makes it intriguing, just not enthralling.

The new season of True Detective is, especially given the burden of expectations, remarkably solid. It’s not a belly flop. It lacks the obvious hook of its predecessor, but I still am eager to see how it develops.

You’ll probably miss the humor of the first True Detective but the brooding sourness of this one is fascinating in a different way, though it loses points for showing us a world that feels far more familiar than the one showcased in season one. When Ani, Ray, and Paul are drawn together as a unit, it takes a while to establish any kind of chemistry between them, because they’re all variations of the Mann-style, soul-sick badass.

Just about everything that made the first season of True Detective entrancing is missing from the second, wholly re-imagined second season. In truth, only the worst, most clichéd parts remain. And yet.... If you make it to the third episode, chances are you'll keep going.

"Potential," in fact, is the key word. It's definitely here, but "2" may also need all eight episodes to realize it.

These are all excellent actors, most of them trying to push themselves out of their comfort zone in the same way McConaughey and Harrelson did, but with more mixed results.... The second season has [Pizzolatto] at times contorting himself into doing things that don't play as well to his strengths, and at others cranking up his specialties.

The plot [in season one] was a means to an end, and that takeaway had much more to do with the characters than the crime. Season 2 keeps that crucial tradition alive, even as the plot gets in the way more often than it should.

If True Detective is going to be more than a vehicle for eclipsed stars trying to reignite their careers, Pizzolatto & Co. will have to dig deeper for a story that entertains--and impresses us as definitively as its predecessor.

Season 2 of True Detective is as slow as molasses, and just as dark, in its first hours.

Although it was wise not to try to repeat the double interrogation format of the first season, there are clever nods to those closed-room confessionals, and the show eventually eases into rewarding drive-and-talks between Farrell and McAdams.... What keeps this Detective from being quite as compelling as the first is the lack of early focus.

Season 2 of HBO's True Detective is almost entirely devoid of the lyrical dialogue, nonlinear storytelling, and treasure trove of literary references that crashed servers and launched a thousand subreddits (for the former, you’ll have to turn to the Lincoln commercials). It’s a straightforward pulpy neo-noir.... The performances are all top-notch and the pacing is brisk.

There is something still lugubrious and overwrought about True Detective, but there’s also a mesmerizing style to it--it’s imperfect, but well made.

The sharpness of Season One gives way to the moodiness of Season Two. And, thus far (three episodes were made available), it’s hard to get a bead on where this is headed.

Even though it’s been a heady year since the first thrilling installment and the season runs but eight episodes, something feels undercooked about this production.

The overriding problem with True Detective 2 is its neck-deep wallow in debasement and self-pity.

True Deetective is both underwritten and over-plotted.

The second season's central mystery is enough to keep you watching, but you can say the same thing about Law & Order. The ordinariness is a quality that weighs heavily on True Detective because its cop-show genre is all over TV.

Whatever the reason, or the combination of reasons, the second season of True Detective drags disappointingly along as wearisome second-tier stuff. That doesn't mean it's without merit. It doesn't mean there aren't dazzlingly surprising stretches.

There's an intermittently engaging trashiness to this season of True Detective, but the overall production feels overbearingly self-serious, though not in any self-aware way that would excuse the entire death-drunk schematics Pizzolatto has designed here.

It's an okay cop drama, to be sure, but it's definitely a cop drama you have seen many, many times before.

True Detective has its moments as a character study. [22-28 Jun 2015, p.10]

Three episodes in, the murder mystery is fairly intriguing, but the characters are not. And while improvement is always possible, that's a hard flaw to fix, in a show that (for now) counts as a miss.

Season 2 loses the novelty of the show’s first outing and highlights the weaknesses.

[Nic Pizzolatto's] chosen the hardboiled-detective genre as his main menu, and given us three eggs so overdone, you couldn’t even stick a fork in them.... Each of the lead actors is doing superb work: Farrell, McAdams, and Kitsch find distinctive ways of expressing their troubled pasts and difficult present-day situations.

On paper, the set-up and the plot may seem workable, but in reality, the characters are both over-written and under-thought. The writers seem to have gone overboard finding layers and layers of trumped up psychology to make the characters more interesting. In so doing, they’ve also made them less credible.

True Detective is trying so hard here it hurts. ... Pizzolatto has inexplicably made every character in this season spout clipped and elliptical phrases. They begin to pile up so quickly that you soon realize there’s no flow to the characters, no realism to them.

Although generally watchable, the inspiration that turned the first [season] into an obsession for many seems to have drained out of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s prose.

The result is monotony. Season one spiced up its mood with a pungent mix of buddy-cop comedy, surreal horror, and mystery. Season two is serious people doing serious things all the time. None of these characters have ever found anything funny in their lives, and none of them have anything interesting to offer one another (or us) beyond solving the case.

The new season’s more-is-more approach feels forced. Even the pretentiousness seems turned up a notch.