True Detective Season 4 Is a Bold Step in a New Direction

The first season of True Detective premiered a decade ago, at a time when two movie stars—Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, in that case—doing a cable mini-series felt like a much bigger deal than it does now, when such things happen all the time. And it was of certain interest that True Detective, created by brooding noir philosopher Nic Pizzolatto, was an elevated sort of police procedural, a murder mystery that tangled with the realms of the spiritual and metaphysical.

True Detective was a phenomenon, though subsequent seasons—the grimy and erratic second installment, the sharp and sad and underappreciated third edition—failed to catch fire. The watercooler event passed as we moved swiftly into a post-watercooler era. But HBO is trying again, only this time taking a different tack. The fourth season of True Detective (premiering January 14), subtitled Night Country, has a new creator at the helm: Mexican writer-director Issa Lopez, lauded in her home country but a newcomer to Hollywood. Lending the show some good old American star power is Jodie Foster, who rarely appears in movies these days, let alone TV. Their hiring poses an intriguing question: what does True Detective sound and look like without the macho poeticism of Pizzolatto and his somber male cops?

In answering that question, Lopez sometimes pushes too hard. There’s a self-consciousness to her season, a hyper awareness of purpose and higher meaning that sometimes dulls and generalizes the drama. There are serious societal ills in Lopez’s crosshairs—the continued disappearances and murders of indigenous women in North America, the environmental havoc wreaked on Native communities by unfeeling corporations—which are certainly topics worthy of grafting onto a whodunit in order give it a sense of weight and urgency. But the show does on occasion slip into a didacticism that undermines its effectively creepy, desolate, probing mood. Night Country does not devolve into a lecture like, say, last year’s Fellow Travelers sadly did. But one does, here and there, wish Lopez would let the season’s themes emerge and prod at the audience more organically.

Aside from its retrained gaze and plainly stated political intentions, the biggest difference between this True Detective season and its predecessors is that Lopez, often quite effectively, steers the franchise toward full horror. Night Country is set in a scraggly town called Ennis in the frigid far north of Alaska. It’s permanent night—for at least a month or so—and many of the locals tend to see apparitions, ghosts, zombies flickering and lurching out there in the dark. Minds are playing tricks, or maybe there really is some force—ambivalent at best, but most likely malevolent—stalking this town, which one character describes as the place “where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.” Such evocative stuff is a hallmark of True Detective, and Lopez honors that tradition with plenty of ominous allusion.

The population of Ennis is majority Iñupiaq people, disregarded and mistreated by the largely white employees of the local mine that is both funding the town’s existence and poisoning it. And there are, as is the Alaskan way, a few lost souls who’ve stumbled up into the arctic circle to hide out or reinvent themselves. One such figure is Liz Danvers, the gruff chief of police played by Foster, a sort of older Clarice Starling lost to grief and cynicism. But the most mysterious residents of the town are a small group of scientists working at a remote research station. They have gone missing and it falls to Danvers to crack the case.

As all true detectives must have true partners, Danvers is joined in her investigation by a state trooper, Evangeline Navarro (former professional boxer turned actor Kali Reis), who has her own grief and battle shock to contend with. Navarro’s sister, Julia (Aka Niviâna), is experiencing an ongoing mental health crisis, while Danvers’s stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella LeBlanc), is somewhat recklessly exploring her sexuality and her connection to her Native heritage. Oh, and there is at least one old murder case that soon comes to bear on the story. It’s a dense thicket of plot connections and intersecting pathos, this cloistered town so choked with backstory and motivation.

Is it too much? At times, perhaps. For a tale set in such a stark location, Night Country is awfully busy, teeming with narrative complication and colorful characters. Text doesn’t always match up with place. But in that way, Night Country is also doing an interesting job of subverting expectations. The humid Louisiana swamps of the first season seemed an obvious place for the gunk and oddity of life to reproduce and rot. But why can’t that also be true of the snow, the tundra, the frozen ocean? Sure, there are far fewer people, but those grinding away up there certainly know horrors of their own.

Given all that the actors have to play, the performances are firm and commanding, full-bodied. The visuals are striking, maybe especially the most dreadful ones—the gruesomest of which HBO has asked not be spoiled. I wouldn’t want to deny you the shock anyway. Despite its hefty sociopolitical concerns, its grave moods of mourning and madness, Night Country can also be fun, a lugubriously overstuffed ghost story that might take place on the outskirts of hell. Though of course, for many Iñupiaq people, it is only hell because that is what outsiders have made of it.

Lopez is an outsider herself, but has crafted a series that honors both the graces and difficulties of a community that few people know much about. In staging yet another knotty True Detective mystery there, Night Country offers an odd but appreciated kind of access. And it points this troubled, always intriguing franchise in a new direction, one that might see future installments investigating other singular locales in order to mourn for, tangle with, and ultimately illuminate those living there. I cautiously await such further altruistic awfulness.