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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
If I were asked to condense the entire era of prestige television — all its plots, moods, tropes and aesthetics — for time travelers from an entirely different entertainment era, I’d probably have them sit down and watch the first season of “True Detective,” the eight episodes starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey during his “McConaisance” career phase of perfect role selection. In those eight-odd hours of television drama from 2014, you can see almost all the distinctive features of prestige TV as we’ve known it for the past 25-odd years.
Like many prestige-era shows, the original “True Detective” is a dark reworking of a traditional American genre, in this case the police procedural in which odd-couple detective partners turn out to be perfect for each other. It’s a small-screen story that draws a lot of oomph from casting marquee big-screen actors. It’s a drama pitched to blue-state HBO subscribers that’s set somewhere “out there,” beyond the creative-class cosmopolis, where liberal modernity seemingly dissolves back into violence and primitivism.
Like “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and many other shows, it’s a story about “difficult” men who embody a fading patriarchy but somehow retain audience sympathy even as they deal out violence and mistreat the women in their lives.
Like the collected works of the HBO Davids — Chase, Milch and Simon — it’s a show made with an auteur spirit, except that in the case of “True Detective” not one but two auteurish figures guided its development, the novelist-turned-showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, responsible for plot and dialogue, and the director responsible for its memorable aesthetic, Cary Joji Fukunaga.
Like “Lost” and its various imitators, “True Detective” is a “puzzle box” show, with a sprawling mythology for fans to obsess over, scrutinizing every frame for clues and secrets. As with “Lost,” “Game of Thrones” and many others, its mythological reach exceeded its grasp, with loose ends sprawling, red herrings everywhere and an ending that disappointed true believers by leaving crucial mysteries unsolved. And like many prestige-era shows, not just supernatural puzzle-boxers but also more realistic dramas like “The Sopranos” (with its near-death experiences and visions of the Virgin Mary), it has a strong post-secular vibe, playing around with magic and religion, hanging out in a liminal space between Christianity and paganism, but leaving its true metaphysical perspective somewhat unresolved.
Also, like almost all prestige television, it has some unnecessary nudity.
This condensation of an entire era’s worth of themes and tendencies helps explain the first season’s cultural staying power, and also the disappointment, in varying forms, that’s greeted the different attempts to recapture the magic in the subsequent installments of the show — including the latest effort, “True Detective: Night Country,” whose finale just aired last weekend.
Freddie deBoer, in an enjoyable rant, argues that this recurring disappointment invests the original season with a quality that it does not actually possess. “Every season of ‘True Detective’ so far has been bad,” he argues, “most certainly including the first,” and just about everything that fans have found unsatisfying in the sequels was right there in the primary installment. He does a good job of exhuming the disappointed reactions to the first season’s finale — here’s my own — while puzzling over why, given that the ending was “widely considered a flop,” everyone has subsequently “imbued the season with so much nostalgia that it’s now frequently held up as a masterpiece.”
I don’t think Season 1 was a masterpiece, exactly; I agree with deBoer that it ended too disappointingly for that. But if you sit down and rewatch the first season side by side with the newest season, “Night Country,” you can see why the original has retained such an intense fan base.
Season 4 is seemingly designed to be a mirror image of the first one, with the frozen Arctic instead of the steamy bayou, female cops instead of male detectives, Jodie Foster supplying the movie-star gravitas (and a Clarice Starling callback) instead of McConaughey and Harrelson, an Inuit goddess haunting the proceedings instead of some Lovecraftian cosmic horror. But it just doesn’t bring what the first one brought: The lead actors don’t have the chemistry that the leads in the original enjoyed, there’s nothing in the structure to match the effective flashback framing used in Season 1, the cinematography doesn’t match Fukunaga’s work, there are no set pieces that match the first season’s famous use of a six-minute tracking shot in a police raid, and there’s nothing in the dialogue as arresting as the baroque nihilistic monologuing of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle (some of which, it should be noted, Pizzolatto seems to have borrowed from the show’s other father, the anti-humanist horror novelist Thomas Ligotti).
Moreover — mild spoilers — the new season is at once too faithful to the original (complete with deliberate references to the Season 1 mythology that don’t go anywhere or make any sense) while failing to fully follow through on its promises of mirroring and reversal. Yes, it gives us cold instead of heat and troubled women trying to solve a murder instead of troubled men, but to the extent that the show unravels its conspiracy it’s the same kind of conspiracy as in the first season, with powerful men mistreating vulnerable women, except in this case some of those women eventually exact a kind of revenge. A full mirroring would have required not just female detectives but female villains as well, not just the patriarchy being wicked once again. (The fact that this time the story treats its pagan forces with a wary respect, as opposed to the eldritch horror of Season 1, also makes an interesting case study in how pop culture often treats male-coded versus female-coded forms of post-Christian religion — the former with more fear, the latter with more sympathy.)
But thinking about this issue of gender reversal made me realize that there is a successful sequel to the original “True Detective,” and it even aired on HBO — it’s just not part of the official franchise. It’s “Sharp Objects,” the Amy Adams-starring mini-series from 2018, about a troubled reporter trying to investigate a series of murders in her rural Missouri hometown.
Unlike the actual “True Detective” sequels, “Sharp Objects” doesn’t follow the formula of having a pair of detectives as its protagonists, though Adams’s reporter character does hook up, figuratively and literally, with a police investigator played by Chris Messina. Nor does it hint at any vast mythology: It’s hallucinatory but not supernatural, with a domestic conspiracy rather than a sprawling political one.
But these variations are what you’d want from an effective follow-up, and in other ways, “Sharp Objects” is working in the same vein as its predecessor. Like Season 1 of “True Detective” it’s a Southern Gothic in which a deeply damaged protagonist works out her own psychological and existential issues while trying to identify and stop a killer. Like “True Detective” it has a distinctive mood and style and setting, in a place that seems outside of modern time. Like “True Detective” it emerged from an effective artistic collaboration between a talented director, the late Jean-Marc Vallée, and a writer, Gillian Flynn of “Gone Girl” fame, whose book provides the source material. And then — again, mild spoilers — unlike the latest “True Detective” season, “Sharp Objects” is a fully female-centric variation on the hypermasculine original, delivering not just a difficult woman as its heroine, but women as the source of its villainy and violence as well.
It’s also open to some of the same critiques — for being pretentious and overripe — as the original “True Detective,” though it does one thing better: Because it has a novel as its basis, and mystery novels face more pressure than TV scripts to deliver on their promises, its ending actually makes sense of the preceding story, resolves its core mysteries and delivers most if not necessarily all the goods.
Writing about “Night Country,” Sonny Bunch wondered why, since HBO replaced Pizzolatto (to his seeming disgruntlement) with the veteran showrunner Issa López, they didn’t just drop the brand as well and let López make a women-driven detective show without the expectations of a name-brand sequel. He cites “Mare of Easttown,” with Kate Winslet — itself a very effective woman-centered response to the difficult-men genre — as an example of a non-franchise detective story that was better for not trying to map its story onto the artistic landmarks of some prior success.
But what “Sharp Objects” demonstrates is that when you aren’t in the formal sequel business, when you slip free of Hollywood’s franchising obsessions, you can sometimes get the best of both worlds: an original work that manages to evoke, imitate and play around in the same space as a past show that people are passionate about, without being burdened by its brand and expectations. That suggests that an entertainment world with fewer explicit sequels might have more spiritual sequels, that a landscape with fewer formal follow-ups might have more interesting experiments and elaborations. Sometimes the best sequel doesn’t know it is one.
Matt Zoller Seitz reconsiders the “Star Wars” prequels.
Tim Grierson reconsiders “Tenet.”
Dorothy Fortenberry on misreading an open-marriage memoir.
Rob Henderson on the Ivy League’s luxury beliefs.
Alan Jacobs on our invisible teachers.
Matt Yglesias on socialists and anarchists.
Robert Bellafiore on conservatism and futurism.
— Brian J. Asquith, “Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation?” American Affairs (Spring 2024)
Although groupthink is difficult to measure, it is hard to look at some of the innovations that have emerged out of Silicon Valley and other clusters over the years and not ask oneself whether the people involved were seized by a form of groupthink. The great rise and fall of interest in cryptocurrency, for example, seems like the kind of bubble where a great many people succumbed to groupthink that generated very little in measurable productive value.
Beyond groupthink, there may be other ways that concentration could both increase an innovator’s patenting rate while pushing them to produce more marginal and less pathbreaking technologies. Innovation is influenced not by peer effects but also by the problems that innovators see in their environment and that capture their interest, either as adults or as children. A recent paper by Jacob Moscona and Karthik Sastry highlighted how this works at a global scale. They investigated how R & D dollars tend to be directed at agricultural pests that are a problem in high-income countries where the research happens but not in the developing countries where the technology is sold, resulting in significantly lower crop productivity globally. A similar mismatch between the needs and interests of 20- or 30-something innovators living in the Bay Area and non-college-educated middle-aged workers living elsewhere may also be causing the United States to generate too much “inappropriate” technology.
… At a larger scale, the best evidence that the formation of tech clusters and the concentration of talent may have led to herding is the patenting trends by technological field. Brian Kelly and coauthors recently devised a way to consistently group patents by technology class from 1840 to the present. They find that as recently as the 1970s, patenting was relatively evenly distributed across classes, but after the 1970s, electronics and computing takes a growing share of patents. By 2000, that one field made up a solid majority of patents filed. It is of course possible that the good ideas were exhausted in agriculture, rubbers and plastics, chemical manufacturing, and machinery manufacturing all around the same time, leaving only computers and electronics as the most fruitful innovation frontier. But such a coincidence would be surprising.
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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