True Detective, season 3 episode 1 and 2 review: back on form and already addictive
True Detective (Sky Atlantic) arrived from HBO with something to prove. The debut run of novelist Nic Pizzolatto’s crime anthology starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Louisiana cops chasing a ritualistic serial killer over a period of 17 years. The result was ambitious, literate and one of the decade’s standout TV dramas.
However, its sprawling, Los Angeles-set sequel (starring Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams) was an unholy mess and notorious flop. So could it bounce back for its third series? On the evidence of its opening double bill, yessir, it sure could.
Wisely, Pizzolatto returned to his original formula: mismatched police partners who develop a grudging respect while investigating a macabre case that spans decades. Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff played cops investigating a child murder in Northwest Arkansas during the Eighties.
Just as the first series was elevated by McConaughey’s scene-stealing turn, this one was dominated by the mesmeric Ali (an Oscar-winner for Moonlight) as intuitive, introspective Detective Wayne Hays. In Vietnam, he’d been a long-range reconnaissance specialist nicknamed “Purple Hays” and he still bore the mental scars of war.
Ali’s subtle, soulful performance was spread across three eras: as a young cop looking into two children’s disappearance, as a hard-bitten middle-aged detective revisiting the case a decade later when new evidence came to light, and as a retiree, grappling with his fading memory while being interviewed for a Making a Murderer-style true-crime documentary.
The opening episode ended with a dialogue-free six-minute scene when Hays peeled off from a police search party to expertly follow a trail through the Ozark mountains. Dread and tension built before he eventually found a boy’s corpse in a cave. The camera lingered on Ali’s face as his haunted eyes processed what he’d seen, then he strode back out into the gloom to seek the boy’s sister.
This was redneck noir: Twin Peaks meets Broadchurch, with a dash of The Killing. Atmospheric and beguiling, True Detective had its hooks into me again.
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