The Cutprice Guignol

It’s been a while since I have been so profoundly aware of The Discourse (capital T, capital D) around a show like I have been with True Detective: Night Country.

The fourth season of the anthology crime drama series, Night Country has, almost inescapably, been a subject of conversation since it began its short run in January. It’s the first season of the show, notably, to be headed by someone other than the original creator, Nic Pizzolatto, with writer/director Issa López stepping up to the role instead.

And, God, this season has been surrounded by a cacophony of noise on social media and in critical circles – most notably from Pizzolatto himself, who described it as “so stupid” and featuring some of the “sloppiest writing” he’d ever seen, amongst other criticisms. He accused the show of equating maleness to badness (or, as he succinctly put it “men=bad”), which, as a purveyor of only the finest brand of misandry myself, I simply had to check out.

And here is my review of the show: it’s really good. Following Danvers (Jodie Foster, brilliant, as ever – the way this woman can imbue a character with history in a matter of moments is just dazzling, even to this day) and state trooper Navarro (Kali Reis, a relative newcomer and instantly-impressive screen presence) as they take on the deaths of the residents of an arctic research station, and how they tie back to the previous murder of a native Alaskan activist several years previously.

I am a huge sucker for noir set against an icy, bleak backdrop, and the fictional town of Ennis during the long winter’s night makes for a strikingly beautiful stage against which to tell the story of these two women and these two cases. The world feels really rich and well filled-out, with excellent character actors like John Hawkes, Fiona Shaw, and Christopher Eccleston matching with lesser-known faces like Aka Niviâna and Finn Bennett to fill out the small community. Deliberately blurring the lines between mysticism and classic procedural, Night Country takes on a really compelling mystery that draws together issues of racism, misogyny, class, environmental rights, and economic corruption, and finds a way to tie it all up in a tight six episodes. Refusing to lean on the simplicity of inherent decency or inherent cruelty, it settles on those blurred lines in-between, with well-developed central characters and a solid procedural element to keep things moving along.

To me, it fits really well with this era of slightly surreal, cerebral crime dramas that the original True Detective had a big part in propagating in the first place, a well-executed example of the genre packed with some of the most unsettling imagery I’ve seen in a mainstream show in a long time. It’s not perfect – the ending was a little over-explained for me, and the dialogue in the first couple of episodes took some time to settle in – but overall, it’s really good. Which begs the question: what’s the big problem here?

The misandry that Nic Pizzolatto so tantalizingly promised me is absent here; I’m loathe to say that he and other viewers with similar criticisms are confusing “a show focused on female leads that also deals with misogyny as it intersects with other forms of oppression” with “a show that hates and detests men as a gender”, but I simply don’t see such a blunt treatment of men here. Yeah, there are some shitty men in this show, as there are decent ones, as there are ones who land somewhere in the middle, much like the women (who are certainly not treated as some untouchable bastions of matriarchal moral perfection, by the way). True Detective has never been a show that’s claimed to feature characters of black-and-white moral standing, and this season very much fell in line with that – far more interesting and compelling than any sweeping strokes of evil men and good women, in my opinion.

I’ve also seen a lot of people criticizing the ending, which I am genuinely a bit baffled by – I’m not trying to be a smug asshole when I say that I’m not sure what more the show could have done to wrap up its story, but I struggled to find the plot holes and ridiculous contrivances that so many critics seemed to take issue with (at least, any more contrivance than the original, Pizzolatto-era seasons did and received far less criticism for). The questions that I had at the start of the season were all answered for me, with a few details left deliberately ambiguous (such as Navarro’s ultimate fate), and I was satisfied by the closing episode, which has received some of the most vitriolic dislike of any single episode of the last year of TV.

Despite all these criticisms, though, Issa López has confirmed that she’ll be heading the show’s next season, with Night Country drawing record-high viewership for the show. Some of that is no doubt down to the controversy surrounding it, but I really hope that her next season on the show is as well-watched as this one has been, because I truly think she deserves it, based on the quality of Night Country.

I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say about this season in the comments – did you love it or hate it? What did you make of the ending? What do you think needed changing, and what aspects do you want to see carried forward into next season?

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out my other blog, No But Listen, as well as my fiction work! You can also support me on Patreon to help keep this blog running and keep my very demanding little cat in treaties, and me out of her clutches for another month yet.

(header image via Forbes)