True Detective Season 3 is Back to Restore The Feelings

I don’t fault the attempts at journalistic parity that often comes from trying to find the art that many people spent copius amounts of time and energy on redeemable. Be it revisionist or wishful thinking, few things categorized as bad one time get to be put out to pasture as bad without some sympathetic rebrand. But let’s be clear, season two of True Detective was nothing short of a train wreck. A sophomore effort that was more sophomoric in its execution. Everything from season one to season two was a significant downgrade, including the acting, writing, direction…really we could be here all day. If there’s anything nice to say about True Detective’s season two its that it wasn’t a clone of the first one. Though, I think many of us would have taken a reskin of season one than watching Vince Vaughan deliver some of this of worst dialogue imaginable.

Now, to begin 2019, True Detective is back for its third season, borrowing a lot more from its first season roots than its immediate predecessor. Back to the format of multiple timelines, un-reliable narrators and enough moral ambiguity to root for everyone and no one each episode, this is a familiar True Detective. But the environment, settings and performances set it apart as its own thing. The show exists across three specific timelines: The year of the crime, ten years later when the investigation gets new life and over thirty years after that when most people have either been buried or at least buried that investigation a…