Why ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Was Doomed to Fail

Welcome back to this Tuesday’s across the movie aisle presented by Bulwark Plus. I am your host Sunny Bunch Culture Editor of the Bulwark of Joy as always by the award winning Alyssa Rosenberg of the Washington Post of Peter Souderman of Reason Magazine. Alyssa Peacher, how are you today?

I’m Danny.

I am so happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up in controversies and controversies. AI video was here kinda sorta you ever wanna see a screensaver that looks like it was designed for Windows two thousand where fish are flying through the air across village streets, Sora can do that with one easy prompt. You ever wanna see a woman lying in bed and see her roll over and then watch her arm turn into the comforter. Sora can do that too. It’s amazing.

You ever wanted to see a PoB exploration of an Ants tunnel that looks like something worse than what you’d see on BBC’s planet Earth. Sora can do that too. If you’ve been online this week, you’ve seen all of these videos and more. As the AI evangelist swear than OpenAI Sora is a game changing revolution, and its ability to turn simple prompts into movie quality video, assuming that movie is like something like a late stage MCU picture or madame Webb or, you know, something from, like, the early two thousands with the CGI, terrible awful garbage. Really, none of those things.

It’s it’s not even as good as any of those things. And yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I know. It’s gonna improve. This is the worst it’s ever gonna look gonna get more realistic. There are some who will tell you that this is the beginning of a brave new world, the whole new era. We’ve got a whole movement that’s gonna unlock creativity that’s just been untapped trapped within people who have no actual talent, but you know, some ideas, I guess.

You know, there there’s just a deep reservoir of those people who society has been wasting for all these years. Let’s be let’s be real here. More likely, the AI is gonna be used for much labor ends than new great works of art. When it isn’t being used for more nefarious ends. On the labor side of things, you’ve got the the losers on the internet.

Look, I’m not I’m not above calling myself a loser. Some of these things sound pretty cool. Like, what if What if you had Batman fight the straw hat pirates from one piece? That’s something AI could do. You know, fanfic.

We’re gonna get some fanfic. What if what if goku fought superman who would win? I don’t know. I bet AI could show us that. Another thing it’s gonna bring bring to life, sex tapes that you didn’t make, but you’re gonna be starring and get ready for the future in which, you know, somebody gets mad at you online, and then five seconds later, you’re in, like, an bondage, Georgie.

Have fun, have fun at the bond to Georgie because you’re gonna be in it. That’s what AI promises, but that’s not the worst of it. Believe it or not. Not the worst of it. The real problem with AI is that it’s gonna give bad actors the ability to create international crises by ginning up phony videos.

Wanna take down the undersecretary of some state for pushing too hard for, I don’t know, aid to Ukraine. Just make a video of him insulting the voters or killing a homeless vagrant for fun. W wanna spark a riot in an urban center of a country you don’t like? Think a video of a cop killing a kid. It’ll go viral and the gas stations will be burning before the city can prove it didn’t happen.

I was watching the second season of Tokyo vice last night. Just started just started watching. Waiting for true detective night country to come on more on that in a minute. And in the Premier episode, there’s a video of a prostitute being beaten to death while the government minister looks on. When presented with the video, he simply says, it wasn’t me.

He he pulls the shaggy defense. That wasn’t me. The denial doesn’t wash because the technology at the time couldn’t affect it. In short order though, we’re going to be in a future where there won’t be any way to prove it was or wasn’t him. He’ll just be like, as AI.

Nizzai. I who will know? Who will know? No one will know. Peter, I guess what I’m saying is that to protect the basic ability of people to actually trust their eyes.

Trust what we see. We have to institute a Butler and jihad against AI and anyone caught using such products should be instantly put to death. Right?

Wrong. Sunny. Sunny. Sunny, this is this is maybe the wrongest you have ever been. You’re very funny.

But completely wrong headed skepticism here is just is not going to be rewarded, ten years from now. So I wanna I wanna take you guys back. Let’s not ten years. Twenty five years or so, give or take to the late nineties and the early All of us were were young in college or maybe still bear the tail end of high school, right, around that time. We sort of went to college in the early aunts.

And What you may remember if you go back to that time was that people who worked at then very successful journalism institutions, mainstream media, outlets. That were that of of the the kind that there are many fewer of today, big magazines, big newspapers, They looked at the internet where people could write stuff and they said there was just this very common view of, That’s never gonna work. That’s never gonna take off. The writing and part of their argument was the writing on the internet is so bad and it’s so bad because it doesn’t have any of the sort of traditional editorial processes because it doesn’t have, the kind of institutional knowledge that you need because of all it doesn’t have all of the stuff that the people working at newsweek, which does newsweek still exist? I don’t know.

I’m trying to find, right, like, some maybe it still exists in some form. But it doesn’t have all of that stuff that you just absolutely have to have in order to create a product that is gonna work for people. And over the next twenty five years, that view was proved I think pretty decisively wrong. It was proved wrong from a market perspective. Like all of those that men all of many of those publications, either totally went out of business, effectively went out of business or have shrunk or undergone revolution.

If they haven’t gone out of business, in many cases, say like something like the New York Times, they have totally adapted to the ways of doing things online and and and bought in. And then in addition, there’s also all of these other sort of, developments, that no one would have predicted even though you can kind of see a a lineage from going back to older journalism, things like Substack, the model that is used to fund, publications like the Bulwark, my own cocktail newsletter, a whole bunch of other sort of interesting up and coming writing. Right? You wouldn’t have predicted any of that. In fact, people were like, this stuff seems amateurish.

It seems bad. And here’s the thing that I wanna sort of make you think about. If you go back to nineteen ninety nine and you look at what was on the intradetch, A lot of it was really, really bad. A lot of the writing in particular was bad. The design work was horrible.

Geocities angel fire. I mean, my gosh. Right? Like, I I had some of those websites. They looked just truly spectacularly embarrassingly awful.

And if you were working for for a big news weekly that paid you a six figure salary and had a drink cart that ran around at five PM on Fridays. This actually happened at some of the publications. I can I I I know this is real? Like, you would look at it and be like, those folks are coming for us. No way.

And I think I think that twenty five years from now, People in the world of filmmaking will and the world of of media will look back at AI and see it in in in something like the same way that we sort of now think of the development of online writing. I’m I’m gonna end with one with one example here that I I think just sort of shows the ways in which you are wrong, Sonny. Yes. There is going to be a lot a lot of garbage created. And there are going to be some kind of novel social problems in the same way that the internet has created novel, social problems, is sort of with the dissemination of media, but there’s also gonna be a bunch of good stuff.

And already just today five minutes before we started this podcast, I was watching the new Billy Joel turn the lights back on music video sing for his comeback single. And it was created with an AI tool that’ll that deages him and allows you to see him singing it through three different eras of Billy Joel, and it looks incredible. It doesn’t look like garbage at all. No. This isn’t Sora, right?

But this is a different AI tool. It looks incredible, and it’s really interesting to see an artist have the opportunity to play with his own image in a way that simply would not have been possible ten or fifteen years ago. And that is because of AI video tools.

Deaging Billy Joel will almost certainly make up for the deep fake AI revenge porn. Alyssa, I would I would wanna ask you a question here because I I have my own thoughts, but I I’m curious to get what you think. Peter has suggested in this in in the last several seconds here. Peter has suggested that the internet has been a boom for the world of journalism. It has been a it’s been a real win for reporting, and it has improved the quality of that reporting.

And it’s it’s really I’m just curious if you think that the internet has been good for the world of journalism or or at at the very least an incredibly mixed bag with lots of really terrible things like the destruction of the entire local newspaper ecosystem. What do you think? Alyssa?

So, There are respects in which I am sympathetic to Peter’s argument, especially as someone who sort of built my bridge to, you know, a very traditional old media job. Right? Like, I am a newspaper columnist at one of the surviving you know, sort of major national newspapers, in part through a blog, hosted on blogspot, So I, I definitely owe a lot of my career to the sort of cheerfully anarchic late Ots online media landscape. But Peter, I think this, you know, I think this portrait you’re painting, of the internet’s impact on journalism is just more mixed than you’re giving it credit for. Right?

I mean, there are things that I think are enabled by the internet in journalism that are fantastic. Right? I mean, my example of innovation, like, probably wouldn’t be billy joel videos. It would be something like bellingcat, which does you know, important investigative reporting often in partnership with traditional outlets. It has sort of a flexibility and a transnationality that makes it resilient and important and able to dive in and partner with whatever media organization matters.

But I, you know, I, I struggle with the idea that the internet has been unmitigatedly good virginalism. Right? I mean, we have a lot of these sort of social trust issues. We have many few, you know, you can argue about whether old media journalism was doing a good job, but there were many more of these job. There were there were just more jobs in the industry from which people could do you know, sort of substantial work.

The idea that people kind of predicted sub stack seems you know, kind of wrong to me just given that there were a tradition of independent physical media newsletters that, you know, were important sometimes they had small subscriptions or a bunch of these in the financial and investment world for example.

Well, I did say that there was a clear lineage back to models that had existed before.

Yeah. And so I’m I mean, I’m struggling a little bit to accept your case that the internet has been unmitigatedly good either for the sort of production. And certainly, we have access to a lot more information. Stuff is disseminated much more quickly. It’s easier to get access to certain kind of sources.

Right? Like, I mean, I think things like nexus and factiva are just incredibly useful and important the ability to do public records, database searches. But I think the ability to circulate, you know, low quality, unverified information has real downsides too. And If anything, the decades during which we have all come up in journalism prompt me to a lot more weariness. Of AI than unbridled enthusiasm.

Yeah. And, Peter, this is, I think, I think the point Alyssa and I are both making here is that if the best case scenario for AI is like, look at what look at what the internet did for journalism. We’re all fucked. Like, like, as a society, We are we are in a lot of trouble because the downsides, I think, much more heavily outweigh the upsides. And again, I think that it’s it’s a combination of factors here.

But the speed with which things can spread can can proliferate is frankly terrifying. I mean, this is why I use the example of a faked police shooting, right, which is a thing that is could vary. I could imagine this happening tomorrow. If you wanted to really mess up a city badly, how would you do that? You would you have if you really wanted to have that down.

It feels like I I live in Washington DC I’ve seen it done already.

Yeah. I mean, I I’m just saying like, I I feel like these

is no way I involved. It was just it was just terrible governance.

Well, I so but I mean, you know, this is what I’m saying. Like, we have enough problems on our own without people intentionally messing things up. And I think the ability of of these AI videos from a from a couple of prompts. And, like, the prompts people are using now are bad and the the programming is not very good. It’s gonna get better.

And as it gets better, it’s going to be more tempting to use these in ways that are absolutely negatives for society. Like, again, the Billy Joel stuff is is great. I’m sure that there are CGI artists working for the major studios who will be able to use these things in real and good ways. But I, like, sit here and I hear people talk about, oh, the great wave of creativity that’s going to be unleashed by these AI and I’m just like, what future are you living in? What future are you living in where, like, the technology always works out exactly like you want.

And it’s it’s it it works perfectly and it’s great. And everyone’s happy, and there’s the flying cars in the sky and the rainbows. You know, I just I mean,

if you guys wanna go back and live in nineteen ninety five or nineteen sixty five, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. First of all, I don’t want to live in those times. And second of all, like, we’re not going to. This is this is how technology and the evolution of technology Bulwark.

It’s it’s I first, so one thing I should say is My claim isn’t, it’s all good, and it’s always all good. Of course, it’s not all good. Nothing is all good. Nothing is no techno, no technological development, comes with literally zero downside. There’s probably one that I’m that I don’t know.

The the really cool clear ice that people figured out how to make. I don’t think anything bad has happened because of and that’s that’s just straightforwardly awesome. Now, like, no technology comes with no downsides. And in fact, one of the very specific things that happens is that technology, while it doesn’t it doesn’t tend to cost jobs overall for the economy. It it frequently costs narrowly costs jobs in specific industries.

A a sort of two easy examples that taxis put horse and buggies and it’s sort of, right, like the carriages out of, like, a lot of carriage drivers out of work. And then Uber driver, Uber put a lot of taxis out of work or made that business at least much less tenable. And that has been both of those developments. The the, the world in which we’ve had taxis rather than horse and carriages and the world in which we had Uber rather than taxis. Both of those things made life better for more people overall.

You can just trace the development of of the US economy over the last twenty five years. Despite the fact that millennials think they had it really bad and indeed did have a really rough start. Millennials are richer than other generations were at this point in their careers more likely to own homes, etcetera, etcetera. Like, it’s not been bad for the economy overall. Yes.

It has been bad for journalist jobs of a very particular type. And we of course have to we have to think about that. But the the argument I was making wasn’t, oh, it’s all good. There’s no downside. The argument I was making was that in nineteen ninety nine, people looked at this and said, this stuff is is trash.

This is low quality and and it will never work. It will never succeed because people need this extra something that we in our institutions provide. And it’s pretty clear that that those institutions were not, in fact, providing a a whole lot of value. And instead, we have sort of we have moved into a different era, and that is going to happen here with filmmaking. That has already happened to some degree with the democratization of everybody having access to to a digital video camera and to editing.

And you know what? You’re right. A lot of the stuff the vast majority of the stuff. In fact, I will I I will say that is on YouTube or TikTok is kinda garbagey is kinda crap, but there’s also a lot of really interesting stuff, and that’s what I’m excited about.

I think human qualities will, in some ways, become even more important because, you know, we have not yet found AI that can, like, correct for someone’s taste. The comedian Eugene Murman once gave a commencement address at my high school from which he graduated. And he had this line that stuck with me. Follow your dreams unless your dreams are stupid. And

Oh, man. That hits home.

And You know, I

Or somebody told me that.

Right. I mean, I think that part of what is going to happen with these AI tools is that people are gonna get to realize the things that have been sitting in their heads for years and realize that other people think they’re ridiculous. Right? I mean, I’m sure whoever created that video of, like, fish flying into the air or whatever. It’s like, that is just a deeply personal image to them.

They’re really excited to see it realized in some capacity, but most people are not gonna be moved by this deeply personal vision. Right? I mean, what makes Christopher Nolan, an amazing filmmaker, is, like, absolutely in part the cinematographers, he chooses to work with costume designers, everything else, but also that, like, his he has the ability to have, you know, the world inside his head actually be something that is sort of wondrous and remarkable when it’s translated to the screen, right? And, you know, take shifts over time, you know, some of the people who are incredibly important in any sort of visual or media industry are the people who can kind of create taste. Right?

I mean, If you think about fashion, for example, the New York Times magazine this weekend has an interesting profile of Rick Owens, who the writer compares to Right Kawakubo, and, you know, to a certain extent, Issey Miyaki, and some other fashion designers who make clothes that don’t in any way hue to a traditional sense of what’s beautiful, what makes the body looks good, and yet managed to be incredibly compelling. Like, they’re just they distort the body, strange shapes, you know, interesting experiments with fabric. And so there are people who can work within an existing standard of are beautiful or visually compelling. There are people who can get, you know, a mass audience to kind of move beyond that. But Not all of us have that kind of vision, though, and the ability to execute these private and personal visions that people think are exciting.

Is not necessarily going to change the fact that taste is very idiosyncratic and important.

I I agree with that. And I I definitely don’t think that everything that is made using AI video tools is going to be good. In fact, like I said, I think that it will you know, in some ways resemble the modern digital video era in which filmmaking is just so much more accessible than it was thirty years ago. And in which a lot of filmmaking and and I count stuff on TikTok. I count basically everything on YouTube as a kind of filmmaking because it is edited.

It is shot and edited and published video, even if it is not very high quality. A lot of that stuff is terrible. And a lot of stuff made with AI will be terrible, but these tools help some people realize their visions and they help some people realize visions that they couldn’t otherwise. And They also create opportunities to do stuff that is, that is that creates a contrast. And Christopher Nolan is a great example because he has become very successful as a as a, not entirely, but as a pro analog filmmaker who has, rejected a lot of the digital aesthetic of his contemporaries and done well because of that.

And he’s competing with it and showing that the old ways are interesting and still have power. And I think that will happen as well, in the AI era. But I I just think that it’s better to have more of these tools and these tools are only going to get better. And we are going to see that they’re gonna change things and they’re gonna give more people more opportunities to do stuff. And we’re gonna see a lot of creative and interesting uses, and it’s not just gonna be the apocalypse.

Yeah. I mean, we’re gonna see a lot of creative and interesting uses when, like, the Maga bloggers decide they wanna, you know, make videos of Joe Biden fumbling around and doddering or and, like, I’m sorry. Like, there’s I the taxi cab horse horse and buggy, Uber situation is interesting because you’re just talking about the same thing being done more efficiently, getting people from one place to the other. Or even even the journalism discussion in a way is about disseminating news more efficiently. And you do it over the internet, it’s more efficient than having to deliver a paper to people or having having people go out and buy a paper.

The the problem with this is that I just don’t see it’s just not the same sort of thing. It’s not like you you’re you are creating this situation where there are many more and new and terrible uses for the thing than previously existed. And I I, like, the negatives are going to far outweigh the positives.

We we we are probably over long in this discussion, but I will just say that I don’t think it is correct on, a podcast about movies to say that no one has ever created fake, extremely realistic looking video footage before It’s always been possible. It’s just been hard. This makes it easier in some ways. And that’s gonna change some things in some ways. There will be there’ll probably be some downsides, but I think there’s gonna be a lot of upsides.

To just as with all technologies.

Alright. So what do you think? Is it a controversy or an controversy that, we’re ushering in an apocalypse, Peter?

Think it’s a controversy that youth are so, that you’re so apocalyptic about this, and I can’t wait for the deep fake sunny video in which you look at the camera and are like, actually, I think the AI is great and I was wrong.

See, I this is what I’m talking about. The I’m being stripped of will here. And that is why we must execute all of the AI users, Alyssa.

That’s the first thing I’m gonna make with Sora.

As controversy. And if you really wanted to be funny, you should make one of Sonny saying that, that Origin is the movie that he’s like most wishes that he’s on twenty twenty three. I because it would’ve made a top ten list.

Well, no. That’s actually true. I did wanna see that just because it sounded so insane. I wanted to see Force ghost Trabon Martin saying you you did it. Aba, you did it.

You saved us.

I think it’s controversial at least, and not least because Peter should probably acknowledge that, the existence of, like, the invention of a taxi. Actually, you know what? Never mind. I I my metaphor is wrong, and so I’m going to withdraw it, but I do think it’s controversial.

It’s a controversy. This is all bad. There’s nothing good that can come of this. There’s nothing

Not that one billy joel video. That’s that’s

all we’re gonna do. Nothing There’s nothing good that can come of this. And it’s it I’m telling you now. I’m just you can pull this podcast up forty years from now. When the world is a smoking cinder because some jerk somewhere was like, oh, I’m gonna make a video of the US firing off nukes.

And then everybody else like, oh, we better do it. We better get we better start it. And we’re all dead.

So they I love this podcast. It’s this podcast and cockroaches that survive after the nuclear park.

Absolutely. I will say that the first images that I made in mid journey were, like, efforts to recreate ninety nine red balloons. So you’re probably right, Sonny.

It’s gonna happen. I’m I’m never wrong. Alright. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus for our bonus episode on Friday in which Sonny and Peter try to explain, madam Webb to Alyssa just like explain its existence. I don’t know how to do it.

I I I don’t know if we’re gonna be successful.

Maybe it was maybe it was a secret experiment in making an entire movie with AI.

Wouldn’t shock me. Alright. On to the main event. True detective, Night Country, which wrapped up it’s season on Sunday. Alright.

So there are two distinct ways, two distinct lenses through which one could view this TV show, six episode trip. Alright. The first is as a discrete season of television, just like a cop mystery show. Right? So Jodie Foster plays Liz Danvers, the police chief of Ennis, an Alaska town up near the Arctic Circle.

When the crew of a research lab goes missing and the tongue of a murdered indigenous woman is found in the lab, Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, who’s played by Kelly Rees, deduced that the killings must be connected. And now they gotta figure out how and why and most importantly why we care. The bodies of the crew show up frozen out in the wastes. They are discovered by Rose Agano, who’s played by Fionta Shaw, who was led to the corpses by a ghost. A ghost took her there.

Not it’s not a I thought maybe later in the show, we’d find out it’s a hallucination or something, just a ghost. And as you see is imbued with what we could only describe as, like, a sort of native magic, I guess, you know, the line between the worlds is thinner up here or some such. Anyway, Danvers and Navarro have to untangle a number of threads involving pollution from a local mine. The research station’s connection to that and how the local and state cops are all part of the machinery of rapacious crony capitalism. Again, something like that.

It’s neither here nor there. None of the diversions entertaining enough to really justify themselves. And every episode is about ninety percent, like, when are we getting to the fireworks factory? Punctuated by a few minutes of, oh, man. Well, we got to the fireworks factory.

I guess I’m excited to see what what happens next week. Ultimately, the series was just kind of dull when it wasn’t really silly. And this is the biggest fundamental problem with the show. I did not care about any of these characters. The emotional stakes were weirdly muted Just one very quick example.

At the end of the finale, there’s this big emotional catharsis involving Danvers and her dead son, And my wife looked at me and said, wait, she had a kid. And that’s a pretty good shorthand for the series as a whole, which did not do a good job of driving any of the stuff home. Alright. The second way to consider this season of TV is, was it a good season of true detective? And that’s a trickier question to answer since true detective is an anthology series and every season is a little bit different.

But what people really mean here when they say this, when they say, is it a good season of true detective is how does it compare to the first season of true detective, which is still widely considered to be one of the best individual seasons of TV ever made. And I think one hint on how we should think about all this is how the creator of true detective, Nick Pizzolotto himself has actively distanced himself from the show. He’s repeatedly emphasized. He has nothing to do with it. That sort of thing you know, not always a good sign.

But to be fair, he also made seasons two and three of true detective and opinions as to their quality. Very most agree that they were not as good as the original iteration either. That said, I am inclined to side with him after having seen the whole season of Night Country. The problem with this show is that it feels like showrunner Isalopes like, wrote a pitch was, like, I got this, I got this idea for a crime, detective show. It’s in Alaska.

We’re gonna, you know, there’s some there’s some spooky stuff, but it’s, you know, it’s about corruption and pollution and what and someone at HBO was like, hey, wait. Let’s make this a true detective spit off. And then she was tasked with cramming as many true detective references into it as she could. So, you know, we see the spiral from the first season. We see Rescole’s dad shows up for some reason.

And then in the cringiest moment of the show, a character, and the finale informs us that time is a flat circle. Terrible, awful. Hated it. The problem isn’t just that Lopez decided to lard the thing up with references. It’s that it doesn’t feel like true detective.

There aren’t nearly enough nihilistic monologues about the cold heartless nature of the universe. I needed, like, four different scenes every episode where somebody just looks in the cameras, like, God doesn’t exist and he hates you and he you’re all alone in the universe and nothing can save you from any of this. You’re all we you just get your own man for man all all alone. Whereas the first season hinted at cosmic Corps, but didn’t actually indulge in any of that silliness. This season is just like, Ghost.

Yes. Ghost. That’s the indigenous magic, baby. And then even the sexuality of the show feels weird and chased compared to the first season. It’s it’s like they wanted show that women could, like, also be horn dogs like woody Harrison, but, like, definitely no nudity.

That’s gross. We we can’t have any of that. It’s like, it’s just weird. The whole thing was weird. The whole the vibes were off.

As as the kids say. I don’t know. The whole thing was very disappointing. I, like, started off the show being like, kinda into it. I was like, oh, frozen corpse popsicles in the middle of the Arctic Waste.

How did they get there? What’s going on? And it was just like, oh, yeah. The the end of the show is a like, a a cleaner SWAT team shows up and bum rushes them all out of the station. Sure.

Why not? And it’s particularly distressing on the heels of the mayor of East Town, which was a great stand alone season of crime drama that set in a specific location with specific vibes and some great actors someone at HBO said, let’s do that. But in Alaska and much dumber. Let’s make it a hundred times dumber than that. Alyssa, what did you make of true detective Night Country?

It was interesting. After I, I had screeners, so I, finished it, I think, a little bit earlier than you guys did, and went back and watched the first season of true detective, which I, you know, I think I had been kinda into at the time, and then soured on a little bit by the end, the end of that first season. And so I don’t think I have sort of intense feelings about true detective as a franchise. And I always thought that Nick Pizzolotto was like, kind of full of himself in a way that I found vaguely ridiculous. I mean, I think the first season of true detective is anchored by a couple of really terrific performances.

And in particular, I think Woody Harlson is has been kind of underrated relative to the praise that Matthew McConaughey got for that season. I think he’s the best thing about it if I’m being honest. Which is a very long way of saying. I didn’t come into this with passionate feelings about the franchise. I made it a couple episodes into the second season, never returned for the third, which I know people say is a lot better.

And so, you know, I I thought this was fine. I thought it was, like, reasonably amusing. As with the original true detective, You know, I think I realize I’m not making much of a coherent argument one way or another here, which is probably because I have weirdly just muted feelings about all of this.

The show is kind of incoherent itself. Yeah. Totally narratively,

And it leans much harder into the idea and the possibility that the supernatural is real, and then sort of runs away from that idea. And I think I would have found this more compelling. Had it gone, like, because the first season of true detective is about sort of the dangers of a private religious cosmology spilling out into the real world. Right? And it’s about the sort of what it’s like to encounter someone else’s you know, very private religious cosmology.

And, I mean, obviously, it’s a religious cosmology, like, by an insane, you know, that’s been developed and embraced by an insane murderer. But, you know, in this season of true detective, you have, you know, throughout much of the series, this argument that there’s a cosmology that’s at work here, right? That’s not like the private creation of some murderous lunatic that is you know, rooted in local spirituality. And then it kinda this just pulls away from that. Right?

It returns entirely sort of to the mundane. And this season of true detective feels very much like an attempt it feels like a remake. Right? I mean, you know, you have this sort of attempt to remake the core partnership. You know, you have Danvers again behaving very much like Marty Hart, and, you know, in terms of her private life, in terms of, you know, the sort of willingness to just obey rules, you have this sort of recreation of the world of true detective, of the first season of true detective, in a way that never quite achieves lift off on its own terms, but then maybe the most sort of radical and interesting way it could have taken off on the original is be like, the spiritual world is real.

Just sort of engaged with that and gone sort of full supernatural. And the fact that it didn’t do that felt kind of disappointing to me among sort of other things. But again, I just I did not feel terribly strongly about this one

way or another. Peter, you could you you kinda got to the heart of why Alyssa was having trouble summing it up, which is that I I think this the show is like largely just incoherent. Just like the mystery at the heart of it is stretched out for so long and is resolved kind of so profuncturly literally with a Secret Podcast way that they discover by falling through a floor of ice? Like, I I I was I was shocked That’s how they went with this.

Isn’t that the goal to shock you with the craziness of a big twist ending? Bad shock.

Bad shock.

Oh, the other kind. Yeah. I I was really disappointed by this season. I am a pretty big fan of the franchise. I will, kind of sort of defend the second season.

It has serious weaknesses and flaws. And I think the third season is actually really quite good. And in some ways, is more in some ways, it is better than the first season as a piece of, I think, overall storytelling, even if it doesn’t have quite the same sort of powerhouse performances, as you got from Woody Sarah Longwell Center, Matthew McConaughey, where Marsha Ali and Steven Dorf in particular are just outstanding in that third season. Great.

So I

came into this. They’re really, really good and make that they make even the stuff that’s only okay in that season, totally worth watching. So I came into this with much stronger feelings about the franchise than Alyssa, and also real hope that, like, this would be something interesting. I thought the first episode was really quite good. Not perfect, but quite good, sold me on the location.

Mostly sold me on the characters, Jodie Foster in particular. Just did great stuff with absolutely every scene. Some not always terrible material, but some mediocre material that she just took and molded. Into stuff that was really intensely watchable. And it’s just I think the thing that I enjoyed most about this, this season was just watching Jodie Foster because she’s so good, and it’s just, like, kind of sitting there and marinating in the fact that I have been watching her now, you know, for basically all of my life.

I mean, I’ve cert certainly thirty something years. Right? And then she’s been acting since she was what? Thirteen or something in taxi driver. You know, in nineteen seventy six, and it’s just incredible to see her still an incredibly powerful performer who can who can just own the screen even if the material around her isn’t all that great.

And that is really the problem here. I think that that wanna be nice to this season, I will say that it often works like a first draft that needed a whole lot of revision. But was maybe on track to becoming something good with a whole lot of revision. I think there are some good ideas in this story and in this story structure. And I think it does not convey those ideas coherently or well.

So one way to think about this is

this is a mis this is a six episode mystery story. The way that these this sort of detective story is supposed Bulwark. And in fact, I don’t I don’t feel like I’m trying to make this show into something that it’s not trying to be. The way that this series, this particular season, tries to work, is that this type of mystery story should work like setting up a super elaborate kind of a a domino chain. And you spend the first three episodes, the first half setting up dominoes.

Right? And it’s just a super elaborate pattern. And then when you get to that midpoint, you tip the the the one domino, and then everything that you set up for that those that first half just knocks down in kind of a delightful, you know, crazy patterns that you couldn’t quite even see. Right? It all just sort of like feels like every single thing was there and waiting for you, and now you get to see it all all come together.

And that doesn’t really happen here. I think there are a bunch of ideas that sort of kind of come together in, say, the final twenty minutes of the final episode, but so much of the of the stuff that we see through episodes three, four, and five in particular you get there kind of linearly. It’s like it sort of sets it up in the scene in which it happens. And that what that means is that by time something is happening, you have no emotional connection to it. This is just happens constantly throughout this series.

It’s not that there’s no at no reference at all to anything before it happens. If you wanna fight me on this, you can come up with, oh, they did point this out like a, you know, a couple minutes before. There was this one sort of like reference. But, like, this this does not have any of the setup development payoff structure that you really want from a mystery series like this and that just the best murder mysteries have. And then you have this, I I think both of you got got at this.

You also just have this kind of tonal and and frankly narrative coherence problem in that it wants to give us some magic and mystery and spiritual elements. And in fact, kinda does. There’s some spiritual ish, like, zombie, seeing ghosts stuff that happens to multiple characters. So it’s not just one person, right, who’s in who’s in it’s in their head. It’s right.

It’s sort of it’s the town. But then the resolution is is all well. We can just explain this using without using any kind of ghosts or mystery or or spiritual elements. And Like, you got you kinda gotta pick one or or tie them together and weave them together in some way. And this is the thing that the show doesn’t do.

It just throws out elements Elm, like in order and some of them are interesting and some of them you can kinda see how in a better draft, a better version of the story. They could come together. And they don’t. And then and then the the final the very final big reveal. I don’t even know this story.

Were you gonna do spoilers here? Yeah. Sunny already did a little bit this. Like all of the the background to sort of help cleaner ladies, they all get together as like a a posse. A posse with guns, and show up to like, it’s just it’s frankly ridiculous.

The way it is the way it is shot and portrayed in like, it’s just absurd. And you could do a version of

this if out loud.

Well, and also the idea that, like, the detectives realized that because they recognize a handprint. Right? Like, I’m sorry. The, you know, I have written a lot about how sort of police dramas overestimate the extent to which forensic science you know, is coherent as a body of knowledge or functional or reliable.

Fairly science. They, like, turn on a black light.

They travel cut. It’s, like, the other day. Handprint is distinguishable as opposed to, like, actually need to sit there and be like, Oh, this is a fingerprint. Like, we need to study this or use a computer program to match it up. Like, what?

Well, she she had been missing she is missing, like, the halves of the two fingers, which is

what

I recognized.

Gotcha. Alright. So but it kind

of makes sense.

Yeah. But it’s like, I mean, it literally

Everything else in this show, it kinda makes sense. It re

I mean, it reads like something that, like, it’s only one person in the town has hands. It’s just like, just

Would you describe this show as propaganda, Alyssa? Is this is this propaganda?

No. It’s not even, like, together enough to be the propaganda.

It did strike me as a sort of a is something as another kind of propaganda. It is it is kind of an attempt at a sort of feminist, re reworking of of the truth of especially the first true season of true detective. And I think in in many ways, not so much, not one that’s like totally antagonistic to it. In some ways, it is too, too deferential to the first season in in the ways that it just sort of drops these like, kinda cringy easter eggs.

But the thing is, like, if you want to make an actual commentary on the masculinity of the first season of true true detective, You can’t then just recast the characters as women. Right? As to be, you have to make an argument about sort of a style of policing and the extent to which certain approaches to things are masculine or feminine. And so, you know, the, the contrast that I think would be actually really interesting is with the first season of true detective and then something like the Netflix limited series unbelievable, which is an adaptation of this ProPublica story about a woman whose rape case was dismissed as unbelievable, for various reasons when it turns out she had actually been attacked by, like, a serial rapist, and who was ultimately caught by, female detectives who took a very different approach to investigating the case. And it’s it is a show that makes the point that, like, contra the, sort of, supposed scientific efficacy of the police like lots of rape kits aren’t even tested.

There’s this huge backlog that, you know, you need to approach victims in a very different way, etcetera. It’s, I mean, it’s an argument that, sort of feminized style of policing, can solve crimes that a sort of more traditionally one can’t, that the you know, more traditionally masculine one can, that, you know, contra the sort of scientific invincibility, some of the scientific supposedly wondrous scientific work isn’t even being done at all. And this show is just such a It’s gender flipped, but it’s not at all thoughtful about sort of gender and violence and crime in a way that would have made it really interesting and power full.

I have to say the the thing that, again, I keep coming back to is if this had if the show had just been called Night Country, You had just called this Night Country. If it had been a limited series along the lines of Mayor of East Town.

Well, and wasn’t that how this was designed?

I I I believe I read that somewhere, but who knows what you read on the internet because the internet is a bad place to get news.

Just wait until the AI. Explains

the show’s origin. On the internet. So it must be true. But but, like, you just call this show Night Country. You just call it country, and you’re like, here’s a new show from Isalopes, and it’s it’s these two detectives, and they’re in Alaska, and it’s, you know, there’s, the indigenous population is being heard.

And, like, okay. Like, that’s a that’s an interesting show. I could watch that. And instead, you they slap the true detective name on it. They start throwing in.

They start rep dropping references to rust coal and the spiral and everything else, and it’s like, why is this happening? Why is this why can’t it just be its own thing? Just let things be their own thing. This used to be the joy of HBO. The joy you know, once upon a time, you didn’t have to have IP to sell a show.

Right? You didn’t have to have a continuation of a series. It was just like, here’s the new show on Sunday nights on We’re gonna watch it because it’s the new show on Sunday nights on HBO. And instead now it’s like gotta be true detective. Yeah.

Gotta give people a reason to watch. And I I understand the thinking. I understand the thinking from the executives on this, like, you know, in the world of streaming where nothing is differentiated you gotta give people a reason to show up. I get it. It sucks.

I get it, but it sucks.

Watch to watch Tokyo vice instead. It’s so much fun.

Tokyo advice is great. I maybe we should do an episode on Tokyo advice because I do love that show because it it it well, well, maybe we’ll talk about that out of future Alright. We’re running along here. What do we think? Thumbs up for thumbs down on true detective night country.

Peter, unfortunately, it’s a big disappointment, and I really wanted to like this series, and I didn’t, to thumbs down. Alyssa.

Thumbs down, but also Nick Pilato you’re annoying.

Thumbs down. And Nick Pilato may be annoying, but he’s right. He’s right to be annoyed by this. So I don’t I can’t be I can’t he’s annoying for other reasons. He’s right about this.

Alright. That is it for this week’s episode. Benny, thanks for our audio engineer, Jonathan Last, without whom this program would sound much worse. May have given him some bleep action to work on. Sorry, Jonathan.

Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for our bonus episode. Tell your friends, strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. We don’t grow, we’ll die. You did not love today’s episode. Please complain to me on at Sunny Bunch.

I’ll convince you that it is in fact the best show in your podcast feed. See you guys on Friday.