If 25 years ago, producer Dick Wolf had stuck with the original subtitle of his first Law & Order spinoff, which was inspired by the prosecution of “Preppy Killer” Robert Chambers, this story may not have been written. After all, recommending a show subtitled Sex Crimes to your parents might have elicited a certain “ick” factor. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem when the drama, retitled Special Victims Unit, premiered on September 20, 1999. Most critics praised the show, even with its “squirm-inducing cases,” and over 14 million viewers tuned in and became regular watchers despite the “heinous” crimes on display, to quote the show’s weekly opening prologue. Svu won new fans in Season 3 when it deviated from the original Law & Order’s all-about-the-case content and delved into what made the unit’s detectives, as well as the criminals, tick. Admitting that the earliest episodes were “a bit too sensational,” Wolf hired...
- 3/28/2024
- TV Insider
“True Detective” Season 4, subtitled “Night Country,” opens with a quote: “For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.” Sans context, the statement seems a fitting framework for a murder-mystery set during an Alaskan town’s weeks-long stretch of perpetual darkness. But franchise acolytes may feel a sudden jolt when the accredited speaker’s name appears onscreen: Hildred Castaigne. Hmm… Hildred Castaigne… why does that ring a bell? Oh, perhaps because Hildred isn’t a real person; he’s a narrator, created by author Robert Chambers, to tell a story in his 1895 horror collection, “The King in Yellow” — the very book that some Reddit sleuths dubbed the “key” to understanding “True Detective” Season 1, or at least all its mutterings about satanic cults, Carcosa, and the Yellow King.
Leading off Season 4 with such a direct reference to the past is a bold choice.
Leading off Season 4 with such a direct reference to the past is a bold choice.
- 1/8/2024
- by Ben Travers
- Indiewire
Liz Danvers, chief of police in the remote Alaska town of Ennis, and heroine of True Detective: Night Country, is fond of telling other cops they’re asking the wrong questions, prodding them over and over until they ask the right one. With Night Country, there’s only one question: Was it worth resurrecting the long-dormant True Detective franchise — and without its original creator, Nic Pizzolatto?
The new season, created, directed, and largely written by Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid), and starring Jodie Foster, answers with a resounding, “Hell,...
The new season, created, directed, and largely written by Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid), and starring Jodie Foster, answers with a resounding, “Hell,...
- 1/2/2024
- by Alan Sepinwall
- Rollingstone.com
It's not every day you hear a TV creator suggest googling "Satanism," "preschool," and "Louisiana," but those mad-lib-sounding search terms were apparently the recipe for Nic Pizzolatto when he was writing "True Detective" season 1. Traveling back along the "flat circle" of time, as Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) would call it, "True Detective" made its series premiere on HBO in January 2014. Almost immediately, it became a water cooler phenomenon, as viewers grew obsessed with its nonlinear crime narrative involving Cohle, his partner Marty Hart, and their investigation of a dead body crowned with deer antlers in a sugarcane field.
Throw in weird-fiction references to the mythical city of Carcosa and the Robert W. Chambers horror story collection, "The King in Yellow," and "True Detective" would begin to take on some quasi-supernatural shadings. Yet as its title suggests, it was also tapping into an interest in true crime, the way the Peabody Award-winning podcast,...
Throw in weird-fiction references to the mythical city of Carcosa and the Robert W. Chambers horror story collection, "The King in Yellow," and "True Detective" would begin to take on some quasi-supernatural shadings. Yet as its title suggests, it was also tapping into an interest in true crime, the way the Peabody Award-winning podcast,...
- 6/5/2023
- by Joshua Meyer
- Slash Film
On Tuesday night, authorities reported that a mass shooter had gone on a rampage in the Atlanta area, targeting three massage parlors and spas in the process. The shooter, Robert Long, killed eight people, including six Asian women.
The news was met with an outpouring of grief on social media Tuesday, with many placing the shootings in the context of the escalating rates of anti-Asian-American violence over the past year in the wake of the pandemic. But in a press conference the day after, law enforcement officials from the Cherokee...
The news was met with an outpouring of grief on social media Tuesday, with many placing the shootings in the context of the escalating rates of anti-Asian-American violence over the past year in the wake of the pandemic. But in a press conference the day after, law enforcement officials from the Cherokee...
- 3/17/2021
- by EJ Dickson
- Rollingstone.com
Former New York City Assistant District Attorney Linda Fairstein found her record under question after Felicity Huffman portrayed her in When They See Us, the Ava DuVernay-directed Netflix series about the Central Park Five. Her decades of work in the sex crimes unit were the inspiration for Law & Order: Svu, but in the early Nineties she was also partly responsible for sending the Central Park Five — a group of black and Latino teens — to prison for a rape that, it turned out, they did not commit.
The Five were...
The Five were...
- 11/14/2019
- by Brenna Ehrlich
- Rollingstone.com
When the body of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin was found in August 1986, her death instantly became tabloid fodder. She was young, attractive, and ran with a rich Manhattan crowd — not the kind of person who usually turned up dead in Central Park.
Yet when it was discovered that she died at the hands of Robert Chambers, an equally affluent young man, the narrative quickly changed, with the media questioning whether someone as cute as Chambers could really be responsible for such a horrendous crime.
He claimed that she was trying to initiate “rough sex,...
Yet when it was discovered that she died at the hands of Robert Chambers, an equally affluent young man, the narrative quickly changed, with the media questioning whether someone as cute as Chambers could really be responsible for such a horrendous crime.
He claimed that she was trying to initiate “rough sex,...
- 11/13/2019
- by Elisabeth Garber-Paul
- Rollingstone.com
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