TRUE DETECTIVE on hbo - Season Two

I will eat this pizza

+ Mahershala Ali
+ Scoot McNairy
+ Jeremy Saulnier (GREEN ROOM)
+ Milch (or at least a little Milch)

- Season 2

? Steven Dorff
? was Season 2 just a rush job/First Draft Theatre or did Nicky Pizza run out of ideas in Season 1

on that last one, i'm leaning toward giving the benefit on rush job/first draft theatre -- feel like there was good stuff in the recipe, just woefully undercooked

http://gph.is/2aeHEbD

oh bugger

https://keyassets-p2.timeincuk.net/wp/prod/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2016/09/Paul-Hollywood-GBBO-GIF.gif

feel like there was good stuff in the recipe, just woefully undercooked

I'm pretty fascinated by all the perfect ingredients in season 2 that ended up in that undercooked dish: the ambition to cover California north and south; the focus on the industrial L.A. outskirts; Nick Cave covering "All The Gold in California"; Farrell and McAdams; the way the characters all end up in the same spot at the end of the first episode;...but, yeah, undercooked and thus a waste of those ingredients.

+ Jeremy Saulnier (GREEN ROOM)

- Jeremy Saulnier (GREEN ROOM) walking off the series two episodes in

Pizza is an awful pseud who got lucky with a talented director/cast and even then the facade collapsed halfway through Season 1

Season 2 is what happens when everyone stops saying no. It's really a fascinating document

otm

are they really going back to the past/present young/old framing again?

even so just the idea of a true detective has got me excited again. true detective!! who is the true detective!!! etc

I didn't like the first season quite as much as most people (McConaughey really wore me down; good thing Harrelson was around to ridicule him), and didn't hate the second one as much, either--it was a mess that held my interest. I'd watch Ali in anything and will watch this.

I'd pick a new kind of mess over creepy notes made from cut-out magazine letters.

are they really going back to the past/present young/old framing again?

tbf this is a good trick and far from exhausted in its potential.

for true detective 4 they should have a time-hopping detective

Yes. There needs to be one of these every 6 months. Sci-Fi true detective. 19th century true detective. High production values and top talent. Just my wish.

link them all together with the occult mythology of season one, without ever really explaining it.

and they're all just older and older or younger and younger versions of mccaughnaheyyey

when we can actually time travel pizza can make a True Detective with cary grant and grace kelly

this series will never better ILX's David Crosby/Jim Morrison True Detective spec treatment

- Jeremy Saulnier (GREEN ROOM) walking off the series two episodes in

― ▫◌▫ (sic), Monday, August 27, 2018

lmao i has no idea. well, grab yer popcorn.

Better to think of this as season 1 of The Mahershala Ali Show

even then the facade collapsed halfway through Season 1

I thought the second half was really strong! I'm still stuck with the image of sadsack Woody looking through computer dating sites. The last episode whiffed it but still had great moments, although in retrospect the egregious Alan Moore steal seems worse than the plot anticlimax.

I started re-watching S1 recently but tbh I tuned out around the halfway point and didn't finish it - the attempted headfake of "maybe McConnaghey is the REAL KILLER" for a couple episodes is a very stupid plot derail

Rewatched the second season. Don't think I'd change anything I wrote above--so oppressively grim and self-serious. I don't blame the actors...I blame them a little...but I pretty much hated all four principals by the end. And that last episode--can't think of another big TV series that had such an endlessly drawn-out conclusion. (I bet whoever wrote it had to be talked out of another four or five Vince Vaughn hallucinations in the desert.) I really hope someone has the good sense to loosen things up a bit in the new season (which I'll get to soon).

Pizzolatto writes everything

hence he doesn't get talked out of anything

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2019 season is nominated in the 2019 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2019 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends January 31

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (4 minimum, 25 maximum, organized by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail by end of day today. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

forgiven lol

why this season so bad and hated

have it ready to go, is it really all that bad

it's bad, but i wouldn't necessarily say don't watch it.

maybe turn your subtitles on as there's lots of mumbling colloquy between vince and colin.

it is v bad

it's worth watching imo. ppl think VV was a disgrace, basically, and at times they're otm sure

shit man I'll watch a disgrace, id cross a street to see a good disgrace

i thought it was ok - not amazing but not ~terrible~

by god thats a rave

i watched it less than a year ago in its entirety and have almost completely forgotten the plot

It fails in lots of interesting ways, and there's some genuinely good/weird stuff in it.

i remember 3 things about this season:

bird head
weird party scene
bleeding to death in the desert

these were all good things but I'm pretty sure that they were the only cool things in the entire season because my general sense of this was that it was fucking terrible

all I remember is people talking in various settings, usually VV

just started this, first two eps

reading thread from start through to how far ive watched

its an exercise in ppl deciding not to like something in advance, watching it and then telling you they didnt like it, citing the reasons they had stated in advance. gripping stuff.

its good so far. nothing original but moody and cast is interesting enough czand it looks great.

maybe having heard what a disaster it was has insulated me from the shock or something.

I’m not going to bother going back and reading all my posts in this thread but I stand by them unequivocally and I’m certain they have aged well

i did some of my best work in this thread, i stand by it #radDetective
also i liked s2

true detective official rankings: s2 > s1 >>>> s3

each are different, each are a version of a different type of quality

I'll throw in this firecracker tho- why anyone would tell you breaking bad is any better than any of the TD series is beyond me

True Detective S1 was a good piece of filmmaking but grotesquely overrated at the time (although opinion has shifted somewhat since then)

S2 is bad by almost every measure, but I treasure it as a monument to auteurial hubris run amok

S3 is fine. A retreat.

Breaking Bad is just better plotted, written and acted - and crucially, it's infinitely more entertaining. But Breaking Bad has suffered a backlash of its own in recent years, so i'm not sure your firecracker is quite as explosive as you think.

i thought the breaking bad plot was rubbish. all over the place, didnt follow any internal logic at any stage.

no better than the sopranos tbh.

i welcome judgment

true detective is a good example of ok tv that is written by some total dumbasses but has a lot of money spent on it, good casts and cinematography, so people imagine that what they're watching isn't fucking stupid trash.

the second season is its nadir.

third season was just blah.

first season definitely the best. the woody-mcconnaughey pairing makes it.

its an exercise in ppl deciding not to like something in advance, watching it and then telling you they didnt like it, citing the reasons they had stated in advance.

pretty much, yeah.

i rewatched it recently and it's definitely flawed, sometimes comically so; it's also often wildly entertaining, usually when farrell is onscreen, and while it steals massive plot chunks from chinatown and james ellroy's novel white jazz, i very much like both of those things, so w/e

I watched it last year, having just watched the first season, and having enjoyed that. very much disposed to enjoying it. having a staycation from work and just binging it in my underwear while drinking beer etc. and I honestly couldn't recount the plot because I just couldn't give a fuck about it.

I believe it was something to do with papers...signatures all over them

I'd read about how bad the second season was supposed to be, but I honestly don't think I went into it wanting to hate it--if anything, that often works in reverse, something's never as bad as what you're prepared for.

But I thought it was pretty bad (lots of posts earlier in the thread). It held my attention and kept me guessing, but it was just so heavy-handed--I don't think anybody smiled till eight episodes in--and Vince Vaughn's ruminations were like a bad film noir parody.