'True Detective': What to Watch for in the Season 2 Premiere

The new season of HBO’s True Detective starts Sunday night with three new true detectives: Colin Farrell as a tough, miserable detective named Ray Velcoro; Rachel McAdams as a tough, miserable sheriff’s detective named Ani (short for Antigone) Bezzerides; and Taylor Kitsch as a tough, miserable California Highway Patrolman named Paul Woodrugh. Together, they will try to solve a miserably grim murder of an L.A. city manager who, before his death, was going to help a tough, miserable businessman played by Vince Vaughn pull off a multi-million dollar land-development deal.

The two qualities that characterize the second season of True Detective are, let me emphasize, toughness and misery. Show creator Nic Pizzolatto, who will be writing all or most of the scripts, has smothered the occasional eruptions of humor that popped up here and there when Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson shared a dusty patrol car in Season 1. At that point, Pizzolatto understood that the stilted, doomstruck philosophizing of McConaughey’s Rust Cohle would strike a normal person (like Harrelson’s Marty Hart and, by extension, us) as pretentious nuttiness, so it required some comic deflation to make the drama work.

Now, however, Pizzolatto seems thoroughly committed to a dark, fatalistic worldview that permits no sunshine rays of hope or levity. He’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.

I’m not going to go very deep into the details of the new season’s plot — spoilers, you know; I’ll write a follow-up piece going into more detail on Monday, once you’ve watched. But certain things can be pointed out and praised. First, 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. At first, Farrell seems to be working a variation on his Crockett character in Michael Mann’s underrated 2006 Miami Vice movie, but he quickly finds new notes and freshly bruised colors to bring the sodden anger of Det. Velcoro alive. As Woodrugh, Kitsch displays the chiseled vulnerability he brought to Tim Riggins in Friday Night Lights and demonstrates how much more sophisticated he’s become at using it to inform his lawman, a guy who’s haunted by his war-veteran past.

McAdams has the show’s most tricky role. It seems written in direct response to the chief criticism in some quarters about True Detective’s debut season — that it lacked strong female characters. Pizzolatto constructed Ani Bezzerides as an almost over-the-top cop, armed and ready to blow at the merest hint of either a broken law or a sexist comment, but McAdams keeps her grounded in a more sensible reality.

Also, the direction of the season premiere by Justin Lin (The Fast and The Furious 3-6) is gorgeously thought-through and executed. He keeps the conversation scenes in tight two- or three-shots, but pulls back regularly to remind us of the vastness of the California setting. Lin puts in place a device to break up scenes — overhead shots of the Los Angeles freeway, with cars moving like swarms of ants — that is hypnotic in its instant allure.

Heaven knows Pizzolatto is steeped in the material he’s working on. Anyone with an interest in mystery novels, cop shows, or film noir can watch True Detective’s season premiere and tick off the influences and homages, from The Maltese Falcon to Dragnet, from Chinatown to CHiPs, from Raymond Chandler to James M. Cain — and above all, Ross Macdonald, whose humor-free tales of California corruption serve as a spirit-guide for Pizzolatto’s pitiless storytelling. (One more and I’ll stop: The surname of McAdams’s character is a nod to the pulp novelist and screenwriter A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides, who wrote the noir screenplays They Drive by Night, Thieves’ Highway, and On Dangerous Ground, among many others.)

As I said, I’ll be back on Monday morning to go over the details of the case. I’ll be very interested to hear whether True Detective’s season premiere grabs you the way the first season’s debut captured the attention of a large TV audience, and left us wanting more and more.

True Detective airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.