Do you remember that sinking feeling you got halfway through the pilot of True Detective 2? That feeling that "oh my, something is missing here. Somebody didn't take the time to really read this one through"? Similarly, True Detective 4 leaps out of the gate with a disastrous, groan-inducing slog of a first episode.
Life on the Rez is a popular trope these days and TD4 wastes no time establishing two very tired, very exploitative clichés - almost a dozen before the opening credits (here tracked by Billie Eilish, joining the ranks The Handsome Family, Leonard Cohen, and Cassandra Wilson, our second indication that TD4 wants very badly to be an outlier in this stoic brand). Some bad-CGI elk commit suicide and we're off, a clumsy, irritating hour of police procedural by way of Twin Peaks. But it looks and feels a lot more like a slew of its own weak competitors like Dark Winds and the truly abysmal Two Pines - ham-fisting Native issues of depression, poverty, mental illness and a mess of sudsy mysticism and hokum down the viewer's throat in a predictable po-leece package.
The real problem is that Issa Lopez's take on the TD formula seems to want to blend a healthy dose of campy horror on top of the campy Native clichés, ala The Terror, or, y'know, Twin Peaks. The show winks hard at a dozen reference points, notably The Thing and every horror movie of the last 20 years. I suspect if this series holds out long enough we can all look forward to Ari Aster's Beau solving beheadings in a Navajo casino. Laugh, but it's likely in development.
TD4, or "Night Country" is desperately seeking vampires to help flow some blood to its small brain. It's the kind of bad script that delivers character-point lines like "I hate the Beatles" and "my dad would kill me if he found out" as both developments and cliffhangers. I feel bad for Jodie Foster and John Hawkes trapped in this dismal affair of cops who are too-committed/not-at-all-committed to what is obviously a terrible job. Moreover, the script offers no relief from the offensively droll "if the victim were white" trope, given that the show has done absolutely nothing to establish the relationships in this small town between the indigenous and the white. Why are any of them there? What do they do for jobs? How do some of them magically have cell phone service while others do not? How can a murder go unsolved when, in fact, that is the whole point of the series?
If these were the only problems with Lopez's script and direction, one could be convinced to stick around. But all of the jump scares and quirky exposition become even more grating when the show leans into its "detective" work. This town has resources: both local and state police plus helicopters for a population that seems to number in the dozens. And because its always night here on the Arctic Circle, no one ever sleeps. Instead, they solve cases by looking at pictures (what detective show worth its weight doesn't have at least one scene of grisly-victim photos or A Beautiful Mind-connect-the-dots overheads?) and begrudgingly acknowledging each other as human beings.
For better or worse, the True Detective franchise has pedigree. Even when it misses the mark (like the slogging Season 2) it manages to present a crime worth solving. For Lopez and Night Country, we're presented with Jeffery's ear from "Blue Velvet", announcing that just under the surface of this quaint, cheerful sunless depression hole at the top of the world, things are so bad that elk kill themselves. And elk aren't the only awkward CGI animals to show up. It's all laughably racist and tired. It just doesn't work.
Life on the Rez is a popular trope these days and TD4 wastes no time establishing two very tired, very exploitative clichés - almost a dozen before the opening credits (here tracked by Billie Eilish, joining the ranks The Handsome Family, Leonard Cohen, and Cassandra Wilson, our second indication that TD4 wants very badly to be an outlier in this stoic brand). Some bad-CGI elk commit suicide and we're off, a clumsy, irritating hour of police procedural by way of Twin Peaks. But it looks and feels a lot more like a slew of its own weak competitors like Dark Winds and the truly abysmal Two Pines - ham-fisting Native issues of depression, poverty, mental illness and a mess of sudsy mysticism and hokum down the viewer's throat in a predictable po-leece package.
The real problem is that Issa Lopez's take on the TD formula seems to want to blend a healthy dose of campy horror on top of the campy Native clichés, ala The Terror, or, y'know, Twin Peaks. The show winks hard at a dozen reference points, notably The Thing and every horror movie of the last 20 years. I suspect if this series holds out long enough we can all look forward to Ari Aster's Beau solving beheadings in a Navajo casino. Laugh, but it's likely in development.
TD4, or "Night Country" is desperately seeking vampires to help flow some blood to its small brain. It's the kind of bad script that delivers character-point lines like "I hate the Beatles" and "my dad would kill me if he found out" as both developments and cliffhangers. I feel bad for Jodie Foster and John Hawkes trapped in this dismal affair of cops who are too-committed/not-at-all-committed to what is obviously a terrible job. Moreover, the script offers no relief from the offensively droll "if the victim were white" trope, given that the show has done absolutely nothing to establish the relationships in this small town between the indigenous and the white. Why are any of them there? What do they do for jobs? How do some of them magically have cell phone service while others do not? How can a murder go unsolved when, in fact, that is the whole point of the series?
If these were the only problems with Lopez's script and direction, one could be convinced to stick around. But all of the jump scares and quirky exposition become even more grating when the show leans into its "detective" work. This town has resources: both local and state police plus helicopters for a population that seems to number in the dozens. And because its always night here on the Arctic Circle, no one ever sleeps. Instead, they solve cases by looking at pictures (what detective show worth its weight doesn't have at least one scene of grisly-victim photos or A Beautiful Mind-connect-the-dots overheads?) and begrudgingly acknowledging each other as human beings.
For better or worse, the True Detective franchise has pedigree. Even when it misses the mark (like the slogging Season 2) it manages to present a crime worth solving. For Lopez and Night Country, we're presented with Jeffery's ear from "Blue Velvet", announcing that just under the surface of this quaint, cheerful sunless depression hole at the top of the world, things are so bad that elk kill themselves. And elk aren't the only awkward CGI animals to show up. It's all laughably racist and tired. It just doesn't work.