In retrospect, Season 2 of True Detective was an unlikely success. When it premiered in 2014, Nic Pizzolatto’s brooding, supernatural-tinged police drama was clearly the work of a lone director given unusual freedoms: Its time-jumping structure and metaphysical concerns were like nothing we’d ever seen on TV before.
But what made the film an instant hit was the unlikely chemistry between its two leads: As Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey portrays his character’s hollow despair and paranoia with his trademark high-strung detachment, delivering philosophical musings about time being a flat circle without getting too oppressive.
[The protgonists] They struggle to control their own demons in order to slay the kinds of monsters that emerge when man’s lust for power and sexual gratification is left unchecked.
Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart nicely complements the exasperation of Cole’s passenger-seat existentialist, bringing some much-needed humor to a series that threatens to overwhelm viewers with its relentless focus on murder and child rape.
As the pressures of the investigation bring out each partner’s flaws, they begin to turn on each other, and it’s to Harrelson and McConaughey’s credit that the fate of their strained partnership is as suspenseful as the identity of the killer they’re pursuing. In the end, the show finds some unexpected and highly memorable relief.
True Detective Season 2 does offer some kind of redemption at the end, but it comes at a much higher price, and you have to endure just as much darkness, if not more, to get there. It’s no wonder audiences were reluctant to go along with the journey, correctly deciding that even veteran actors like Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn wouldn’t be able to recreate the McConaughey/Harrelson magic.
But Season 2 is more subtle and slow-paced. Farrell plays Ray Velcoro, a detective in the Los Angeles-area city of Vinci who works for local crime lord Frank Semyon, played by Vaughn. Velcoro is divorced and an alcoholic with an estranged son who may have been the result of his wife’s rape more than a decade ago. Semyon helped Velcoro track down his rapist and get revenge, and now Velcoro is indebted to him.
Semyon needs Velcoro to ward off nosy reporters who scrutinize his deals, helping him operate legitimately and give up drugs and gambling for more respectable bribery and government fraud. Semyon’s deal (in which he has invested his life’s savings) is put in jeopardy when the corrupt and sexually depraved mayor of Vinci is found dead with acid-burned eyes and a massive shotgun wound in his groin.
The murder investigation becomes a joint effort between Velcoro, Paul Woodruff (Taylor Kitsch), the California Highway Patrol officer who discovered the body, and Ventura County Sheriff’s CID Agent Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams). Their developments are followed as Semyon tries to save his future, with Velcoro acting as a go-between between the two.
Vaughn’s performance as Semyon is somber and down-to-earth, with traces of his earlier, tongue-in-cheek roles (“A Mexican standoff with a real Mexican,” Vaughn marvels at a tense showdown with a rival: “That’s on my bucket list.”) He’s ruthless, but only because it’s necessary to his journey from a childhood of poverty and abuse to the leader of a modest but thriving crime family. He treats his men like family, and is desperate to have a child with his loving wife and trusted adviser, Jordan (Kelly Reilly, who later appeared in “Yellowstone”). As they struggle to conceive, the couple considers adoption, which Jordan convinces Frank would do as a way to make amends for his own difficult childhood.
Season 2’s four central characters are all grappling with fatherhood in some way: Woodruff, who never knew his father and was raised by an irresponsible, alcoholic mother, tries to overcome deep ambivalence about marriage when his girlfriend unexpectedly becomes pregnant.
Velcoro is a pre-Rodney King-era retired LAPD officer looking after a resentful father while trying to protect and guide his bullied, self-doubtful son, while Bezzerides, unwilling to confront the childhood trauma caused by his New Age guru father’s indifferent upbringing, maintains his prickly appearance (and a hidden arsenal of knives) while numbing himself with wanton sex.
These personal struggles take place against a backdrop of vast corruption, as they struggle to control their own demons in order to defeat the kinds of monsters that emerge when the human desire for power and sexual gratification is left unchecked.
This is a special duty of fathers, and Season 9’s episodes are unashamed about the many ways fathers fail to fulfill it, and how the effects of that failure ripple through entire communities and generations. What makes True Detective Season 2 so enduring is its timeless emphasis on the sacrifices that come with fatherhood. All good fathers give something of themselves. Some give their all.
