We're a little over a week away from the June 21 season two premiere of HBO's True Detective, which will introduce us to brand new characters and storylines. That the first season of the anthology series left a bad taste in many viewers' mouths has not curbed anticipation for the new season, and this is likely because the show is getting a fresh start. True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has again written all the episodes, but Cary Fukunaga won't be returning as director – that duty will be split among a rotating crew that includes Justin Lin and Janus Metz Pedersen. Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell will replace Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as co-leads, and Rachel McAdams will play a detective – not a hooker or a put-upon wife/girlfriend, like most of the female characters in season one.
When True Detective premiered in early 2014, audiences *really* wanted to love the show, and for close to the first half of the season, we mostly did. But at a certain point, we had no choice but to be skeptical that the show's inexplicable supernatural infusions and dangling references to Chambers and Lovecraft would lead to a satisfying, coherent and/or original conclusion. The inferences made by a close-watching audience, conditioned to expect some kind of payoff for the relentless dissecting of so-called highbrow television, began to outpace the intellectual force of the show itself, setting everyone up for disappointment. Indeed, the True Detective season one finale – which the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum called a “near-total wash” -- far from made due on the preceding episodes' uneasy promise to deliver something as smart as the show took itself seriously; following through on almost none of the insinuations that True Detective was so much more than your standard-issue crime drama.
“[True Detective] feels less hardboiled than softheaded,” Nussbaum wrote midseason. “Which might be O.K. if True Detective were dumb fun, but, good God, it’s not: it’s got so much gravitas it could run for President.”
By the looks of True Detective's season two trailer, the gravitas is still running high. And so might be the sister – and more sinister – quality of that gravitas: Permission for male “heroes” to treat other people (particularly women) like garbage in the setup for self-redemption and in the service of a bygone masculine mystique.
“Sometimes your worst self is your best self,” Vince Vaughn tells Colin Farrell in the season two trailer. While we have no context for the line, it sounds like an all-too familiar message: That men can and should be permitted to behave as badly as their appetites will allow, perhaps as a preemptive reward for being so darn useful when they want to be. In recent years, premium cable has given us female characters with comparable latitude to be terrible – notably Carrie Mathison and Jackie Peyton – but the women of True Detective's first season served mostly as props. Of course, this is nothing new: Crime stories have long cast the troubled loner cop (or civilian) burdened by an intensely complex inner life as the avenger of a female victim who cannot speak for herself. And while one reading of the crimesolver genre is that it gives agency by proxy to the victim, the avenger's own redemption is typically the story that really matters. (Even Serial, the wildly popular true crime podcast devoured by the chattering class this year, was far more interested in humanizing a convicted killer than the bright and beautiful teenage girl he was found guilty of murdering.) In the case of True Detective's inaugural season, the dead victim and the dead-eyed prostitutes the detectives meet along the way to solving her murder are there to demonstrate the worth of the male leads, not the value of their own lives.
“When a mystery show is about disposable female bodies, and the women in it are eye candy, it’s a drag,” Nussbaum wrote of True Detective. Naturally, she was not alone in her critique: Numerous critics and viewers wrote of True Detective's so-called “woman problem;” while others argued that the problem lay with the show's characters, not its writers.
However divided the interpretations, it seems like Pizzolatto might have been paying attention; he certainly had the opportunity to consider audience feedback as the second season didn't begin filming until many months after the first season aired. Two major changes that we know of are concerned with elements of the show that turned some viewers off: The lack of powerful female characters, and the show's shallow preoccupation with the occult. In an interview published on Medium, Pizzolatto said he had abandoned earlier plans to make the season about the “secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system.” In other good news, McAdams is part of the main cast; and Abigail Spencer, who will appear in a recurring role, indicated to Deadline that we can expect more dynamic female characters this season. “You can tell from the trailer that Rachel McAdams' character is not lacking [in] complexity or strength,” she said. “There's going to be some amazing performances from women on the show for sure.”
Many might disagree, but I'd argue that we've witnessed a remarkable sea change in movie and television audience expectations, even in the year and a half since True Detective's first season aired. It really feels like content creators can't get away with relegating women and minorities to the sidelines quite like they used to: People are tired of the same old stories – men and women alike – and there are more avenues than ever for professional and armchair critics to hold creators and distributors accountable for the messages their stories promote. And you can find evidence of this fatigue beyond the virtual pitchforks: While Entourage the TV show was a hit for HBO during its eight-season run that ended in 2011, the Entourage movie had a disappointing box office draw when it opened last weekend, losing out to the female-led comedy Spy, which took the number one spot with $30 million. Two of the most successful new television shows last year – Jane The Virgin and Transparent - were centered on a Hispanic female and a transgender woman, respectively. Transparent took the Golden Globe for best comedy series. I could be wrong, but I don't think that would have happened even three years ago; maybe less.
And it's also only in recent years that we could conceive of showrunners making creative and casting decisions about future seasons based on social media backlash; assuming any of that informed the direction of the upcoming True Detective season. While I'm cautiously optimistic, it's too soon to tell if Pizzolatto and HBO incorporated the criticism of the first season in a meaningful way, or if time truly is a flat circle.
True Detective Season 2 will air on HBO on Sunday, June 21 at 9 p.m. ET.
