Overacting, or at least speechifying, is another matter, and both Ali and Pizzolatto (who writes the first five episodes, with an assist from David Milch of “Deadwood” in Episode 4) rein it in.
Of course, acting talent has never been the problem with “True Detective,” give or take a miscast Vince Vaughn. (The season’s exploration of race is intriguing but can feel forced, like the treatment of gender in Season 2.) In 2015, he is shaky and guarded, his memories splintered by dementia, as he tries to recall the case, and what may have gone wrong, for a “Making a Murderer”-style documentary. But the show really belongs to Ali (who just won a Golden Globe for “Green Book”), and he’s coolly magnetic.Īs Hays in 1980, he has a dry, outsider affect he served in Vietnam as a solo reconnaissance tracker, and as a black man in a largely white community, he stands apart. The season is nominally a story of partners, as if to keep up the tradition (and honor all those “True Detective 3” internet memes). They crack the story open like a rotting log, and all manner of sadness scurries out: the local dead-enders who come under suspicion, the spiraling marriage of the children’s parents, Tom (Scoot McNairy) and Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer).
The new story returns to the South, a scrubby, hard-luck patch of Arkansas where the partners Hays and West catch a case involving two children who disappeared on a bike ride. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.
Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. If you score “True Detective” Season 3 on originality, it fails - for repeating both its own history and the already-dated cable genre of glum loners confronting the evils men do.īut if you treat it as a do-over - if the series, like one of its haunted antiheroes, is retracing its steps to try to get things right - then it’s fine. They want to sell me a piece of ass, they’ve got the right.” Mostly by having body issues.” Now, Roland West (Stephen Dorff) tries to persuade his partner, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), to go to a brothel, saying: “I’m a feminist. In Season 2, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) declared: “I support feminism. We meet, again, hardscrabble poor folk and ambitious politicians we find, again, creepy totems left at the crime scene and intimations of the occult.Įven the jokes repeat themselves. It takes place over three time periods, decades apart: an investigation, a re-investigation and a re-reinvestigation. How many ways does the new season of HBO’s noir dirge return to familiar ground? The new case, like the first season’s, involves brooding Southern police and a horrifying crime against children. “True Detective” Season 1 told us that time is a flat circle.