TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

There could have been 60% less plot, and in its place very long philosophical/etc conversations en route to the drug bust, the orgy, etc. Would've played more to Nic P.'s strengths.

I actually think Pizzolato's plotting is very solid; he's just bad at endings. TD season 1, and his novel Galveston, and this season all ended very clumsily. On the other hand, his dialogue has always been comically awful. McConnaughey and Harrelson just did a better job of selling it.

i maybe missed something but it felt like the denouement of this hinged on the same kinda non-seqitous epiphany as last time, when they suddenly realised through abstract thought association that the greenness of a shed existing beguilingly in a snapshot found by chance felt auratically comparable to the lawns mowed by the killer. & in this i feel like they went from this sputtering generic conversation about the death of tim riggins to working up a fully formed dossier of the siblings & their grudges.

as suddenly as a blast from a Remmington, the Catalast Group established their fifedom

"Failed to upload recording to chadvelc✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧" justified the entire season

^^^^ really dark stuff

When I saw that, I was like "would I feel better/worse if the upload had succeeded?" And then I realized I didn't care. About a lot of stuff in the show.

frank's wife will never get pregnant now :(

why the fuck did he have grampa velcro's badge at recess

because it helps his D&D character cast spells better duh

But in the end he also dies pathetically whilst dwarfed by a majestic natural environment, shot all to shit after prancing around the redwoods and trying and failing to operate his cell phone, after losing his previous cell phone with the recording of the evidence of the big conspiracy because someone stepped on it, plus he’ll never know his son was actually his son and not his wife’s rapist’s, and in the end his character arc was basically what would happen if Cormac McCarthy had written Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic,” and the hell with it.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/true-detective-season-two-lines-ranked-1723048186

why the fuck did he have grampa velcro's badge at recess

― gr8080, Monday, August 10, 2015 4:39 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha otm so sloppy

the whole redwood forest scene was ridiculous:

1) as someone pointed out above, it's many, many hours drive from LA
2) Velcoro freaking out, dropping the bag and tripping over the money
3) Holding the fucking phone in one hand and a gun in the other, focused on the phone
4) Final comedic pan to the phone

wtf

"Failed to upload recording to chadvelc✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧" justified the entire season

― Number None, Monday, August 10, 2015 8:19 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of the things that makes watching this show difficult is the shadow of the first season, which was very good, & which has no presence in this season but is kind of an unavoidable presence, looming over & ruining everything, suffusing all of the bad, slack scenes with memories of better direction/performances/dialogue. i think because the show is also kind of a formal experiment, of however broadly mapping some kind of Classic True Detective formula across different stories & characters, there is a lens through which you are watching the show which wouldn't apply if this was the first season. Knowing This Story Reflects Juvenile Writer Nic Pizzolatto's Determined Effort To Create Powerful Art, while watching scenes that are so shallow & graceless & brash in their attempt to elicit feeling, just dwarfs everything that's happening on screen to me; the failure-to-upload thing was such a cheap shot, i think. it's so unpoignant, is such a laboriously assembled machinery to inflict such a dull pain on the audience, & i don't know what it would be like to watch it without the kind of jaded x-ray eyes that gift you the knowledge that what you are seeing is just pizzolatto flexing his daringly comprehensive nihilism.

i remember watching some of the last series of 24, in which a show from ten years ago existed in current time, & awkwardly preserved its tv show grammar; there would be these long incredibly sincere soap opera-ish earnest glances between characters, jack furrowing his brow with concern & gazing forlornly in the direction of a love interest in need of his protective care. this kind of emotional grammar gets old so fast, the exchanges seeming suddenly kitschy & inappropriate & over-earnest, & true detective feels so full of just tired, tiiired shit like indulgent thirty second shots reveling in the aura of a depressive guy with a furrowed brow at a bar, or the terse baritone utterances of various basically-cowboy archetypes, just like ... nineties garbage, lynch homage somebody else homage sam peckinpah poster on the wall garbage. it's so bad. this season is so pre-sopranos. it is from a pre-sopranos world. it is mfa studentish in just being a thin layer of leaves raked over a crude assemblage of things that would seem super cool in a tv show.

The whole season has been so dreadfully serious, without a thought of comic relief, and then we get .. a message on a cell phone. This is humor.

2) Velcoro freaking out, dropping the bag and tripping over the money
3) Holding the fucking phone in one hand and a gun in the other, focused on the phone
4) Final comedic pan to the phone

i lol'd

A discussion about Ray being such a "North Hollywood cowboy who misses the Palomino" led to a brief conversation about the Long Ryders and Lone Justice

1) as someone pointed out above, it's many, many hours drive from LA

maybe in reality he was still somewhere 'back there' (like frank was) & forest scene was hallucination (like frank's wife was), fulfilling dream-prediction of death among the tall trees & men with guns
jk but that wd've worked

Also a gif of

http://imgur.com/4GaaL49?desktop=1

http://imgur.com/NzOzx1w?desktop=1

Would be nice for any Laurel Canyon rock threads on ILM

velcoro and semyon suiting up and doing a crime was p. cool i thought

http://imgur.com/4GaaL49?desktop=1

Http://imgur.com/NzOzx1w?desktop=1

i liked osip saying frank was like son to him (lol on 2 levels, with & at show)

I had no idea there were so many cars in Laurel canyon...or is that just the feeeway?

the extent to which some of these criticisms are contingent on the meme of nic pizzolatto being a real macho man when he really is a lit geek with an interest in transgression and crime and familial connection and a subpar understanding of nihilist theory is showing hard of late, and starting to wear thin

Understood. we're just having a laugh

i liked osip saying frank was like son to him (lol on 2 levels, with & at show)
--drash

this moment actually annoyed me. I was fine with most things that verged on or blatantly were urban noir cliche but that one even my inveterate TD defender self had to go OH COME ON

feel compelled to acknowledge persuasiveness of schlump's pan, yet
still feel sense in which or extent to which this was bad was bad in ways i hadn't seen tv being bad before, which at times led to place which felt beyond good & badness
wd also argue that whatever this show's badness, it's totally, necessarily, post-sopranos

the whole redwood forest scene was ridiculous:

1) as someone pointed out above, it's many, many hours drive from LA
2) Velcoro freaking out, dropping the bag and tripping over the money
3) Holding the fucking phone in one hand and a gun in the other, focused on the phone
4) Final comedic pan to the phone

wtf

― calstars, Monday, August 10, 2015 7:57 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also how he actually took 2/5 of the guys out and was then like fuck it, ani's good, i'm just going to run out into the open and get shot

All the problems aside, I'd still rather watch a show reaching for profundity than the new Hawaii Five-O.

and schlump otm mostly, i am viewing this season as a fascinating example of what happens when something that needs 3-4 rewrites is actually just shot as-is.

one criticism i'd add, relative to s1-- an admittedly pre-sopranos quality of s2-- is that overall pizza played it safe with the main characters

with exception of ray's 2 brutal beatings, these ostensibly super-damaged self-destructive dark characters were overall pretty strait-laced good & heroic
imo si's protagonists much more complicatedly (& challengingly) flawed
one reason i've ended up liking vv's performance is that (whether intentional or unintentional) it lent opacity to frank's character, a genuine indeterminacy (e.g. re whether by show's peculiar code he's good or bad guy)

Yeah, and why not from HBOs perspective...they can get away with it and not lose any viewers for season 3. Anyone here _not_ on board for next season?

also tbf to show, one-season length imposes distinct constraints on plot & characterization
makes it qualitatively different genre from sopranos etc, basically (season to season) it's a miniseries

one of the things that makes watching this show difficult is the shadow of the first season, which was very good, & which has no presence in this season but is kind of an unavoidable presence, looming over & ruining everything, suffusing all of the bad, slack scenes with memories of better direction/performances/dialogue. i think because the show is also kind of a formal experiment

i think this is key - just in terms of viewer reception given the broadest idea of the format, multiple seasons, different stories/worlds, same writer/runner.

might be more valid to view this as proof of concept, so that more capable writers / writers w/ more resources, time, etc., can do something with it.

like, if you watch treme, you can kinda be like, cmon simon this is no wire, but you're also just barred from bringing that to bear really - it's just a different show

and if you watch a single series that has its bad episodes, even its lesser seasons, you can write it off to, well, they can't all win emmys

but in between, it's not quite that it's shows-within-a-show, and the individuality of the seasons acts like enough of a reset that you won't just allow the writer his local failures in comparison with earlier successes

vaughan's character ultimately came closest to marty from s1 (which i maintain was nic p's secret weapon) but like most of s2 he didn't really come from a recognizable place

my thing is, did we need *that* much plot?
the episodes where the focus narrowed were much more enjoyable

the final ep was a hefty bag full of offcuts and loose ends, i seriously could not give a care about 90% of what happened. and names so many goddamn names

the plot was *fine* it was just rolled out poorly.

i mean how many loose ends from episodes 1-3 did they try to tie up in episode 8, that doesn't mean they were bad ideas but it does mean they weren't really handled well

this moment actually annoyed me. I was fine with most things that verged on or blatantly were urban noir cliche but that one even my inveterate TD defender self had to go OH COME ON

true, but i still enjoyed the punchline (frank switching weapon & shooting him); what made it more than just genre cliche was specific context of frank's (& tds2's) daddy issues

I had no idea there were so many cars in Laurel canyon...or is that just the feeeway?

― calstars, Monday, August 10, 2015

feel like if u cannot tell laurel cyn from 101 u r not a cal star

xp fair point.

I mean I really enjoyed this, and I recognize what was actually bad and what was called bad for the sake of #content production, and think the latter exceeds the former. I sort of think if it'd been a novel it wouldn't have received as much criticism if any

also wonder if them going to venezuela, a notably socialist country, was just a random idea or intentional. I think it was intentional and tied to the points the show hoped to (and sometimes failed to) make

but a novel....is not a tv show

I was not happy that the end of Ani's story was life on the run as mom to Velcoro's miracle babby; her story arc got short-circuited in the interest of knitting together more strands of male fatherlessness, and Frank's wife as complacent surrogate-grandma sidekick made the sexism of the ending about as subtle as rubber buckshot

OTOH props to Pizza for wrapping it all up with a sweet Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid shout-out

I liked it. Bring on S3!

her story arc got short-circuited in the interest of knitting together more strands of male fatherlessness

otm (not just male fatherlessness but sonlessnes; her destiny serves to be vehicle for ray's posthumous happy ending: he will have had 2 true sons)

1 failson 1 coolson

someday they can face off from opposite sides of the law in true detective season 27

but a novel....is not a tv show
--call all destroyer

sometimes it kind of is tho! in this situation it was not

velcoro and semyon suiting up and doing a crime was p. cool i thought

― where the sterls have no name (s.clover)

pumping guitar riff as they drove up into the hills towards the cabin had a wire chairs missing vibe to it.