Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season of True Detective Photo: HBO
The latest episode of True Detective has it all what you need. I want a creepy New Year's riddle. This is the remote and atmospheric town of Ennis, Alaska – an icy purgatory that, if not at the end of the world, is certainly just a few stops away. As with previous seasons, True Detective: Nightland features a stellar cast, including Jodie Foster and Christopher Eccleston as cops trying to maintain their sanity as the arctic midwinter banishes sunshine and all positive vibes.
There are hints of the supernatural with the return of the spiraling motifs that enraged the Internet when the original True Detective arrived a decade ago, putting the afterburners under Matthew McConaughey's McConaissance.
What's missing, however, is any meaningful input from True Detective creator and still its guiding light Nic Pizzolatto. The former creepy noir prodigy is taking a backseat and is simply listed as an executive producer: Hollywood's way of thanking him for his previous contributions to the franchise. Otherwise, Nightland, arriving on Sky Atlantic on January 15, is a land untouched by Old Nick. Instead, responsibility passed to veteran Mexican writer-director Issa Lopez.
Hollywood writers are notoriously thin-skinned. Many would be unhappy to see their life's work continue without them. Not Pizzolatto. Otherwise, he is busy on many fronts. He's working on a horror film for Blumhouse, the studio behind recent spin-offs “Halloween” and “The Exorcist,” and is collaborating with Vince Vaughn on a project about a Las Vegas lounge singer. There's also a small question about his script for Marvel's reboot of vampire anti-hero Blade.
All in all, Pizzolatto isn't all about being True Detective. He doesn't complain. If anything, he's probably delighted. The success of True Detective in 2014 took everyone by surprise, especially the young writer who had just arrived in Hollywood and was determined to make his mark. The problem was that he didn't want to leave a mark on his forehead that a True Detective would figuratively tattoo on his forehead.
His dissatisfaction stemmed from the difference between his vision for True Detective and how the public received it. Pizzolatto was a published writer and deep thinker who saw True Detective as a deconstruction of modern masculinity. Stars McConaughey and Woody Harrelson supported this vision by playing the roles of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, hardened Louisiana cops investigating a series of cult murders. But for Pizzolatto, the murders were just window dressing: the real secret concerned the internal struggle of the main characters. It was not a detective story, but rather “what is this?”
For Cole, this vulnerability was linked to the death of his daughter. In Marty's case, it was about his serial infidelity and the shell his marriage had become. However, to Pizzolatto's apparent chagrin, audiences were more interested in the cult murders and supernatural horrors of Lovecraft. The latter were provided through references to Robert Chambers' 1895 novel The King in Yellow, about a play that induces madness in the audience (a sort of 19th-century Saltburn).
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the movie “True Detective” Photo: HBO
Already during the airing of the series, it became clear that the intentions of Pizzolatto and the players did not coincide. He compiled one of the programs. The audience saw something completely different. “I'm not interested in creating hideous monsters or the world's most bizarre serial killer,” the arrogant writer told TV Guide. “My main concern is always the humanity of the characters. Where the show finds its strength… I think it's in things that have nothing to do with investigations at all. It's when two men talk to each other in a car… That's what always interests me.”
The first episode of True Detective continued to hint at the esoteric until the very end. The finale included a sequence in which Cole hallucinated the void of space right in front of Lovecraft. However, Pizzolatto has spent the last 10 years trying to convince the world that he is the wrong person. The one who came up with the brilliant idea to combine pulp fiction with the supernatural. This is fine. HBO hired Lopez to do it instead, and she gave an impressive performance in Nightland. Gloriously dark, it references John Carpenter's Antarctic horror The Thing and Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness (a major influence on Carpenter).
Pizzolatto climbed his snowy peaks in search of his true voice. He recently posted a picture of a table read with Tom Cruise in 2012 on Instagram. “Although it didn't lead to us becoming best friends and traveling companions as I had hoped, it remains a career highlight,” he wrote.
True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto in 2019 Photo: Getty
The book was a reboot of the classic Western The Magnificent Seven, which Cruise left to make the same Mission: Impossible movie over and over again. Pizzolatto, however, remained in the saddle and, together with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua, brought the project to the screen in 2016.
But despite a stellar cast including Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke, it failed to set multiplexes on fire. For all its potential, The Magnificent Seven was only a worthy second chapter in Pizzolatto's career.
Of course, by 2016, he knew what failure was. He was still trying to come to terms with the disastrous second season of True Detective, a disaster so enormous and all-consuming that many believed it had retroactively ruined the original McConaughey-Harrelson two-hander.
The second episode of True Detective had a lot of problems. Viewers were disappointed by the lack of references to the supernatural. Vince Vaughn was mistaken for a brooding gangster. The plot turned out to be confusing. Pizzolatto was flying solo after rumors of a falling out with director Cary Fukunaga, whose improvisational and memorable style elevated the first series.
Twelve months after this unexpected triumph, it was simply Pizzolatto. HBO, the prestigious network behind TD, had high hopes. Netflix newcomer Chippy was breathing down his neck. HBO programming president Michael Lombardo was counting on Pizzolatto to succeed. He pressed too hard. Pizzolatto cracked.
Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell in the second season of True Detective Photo: HBO
“Our biggest failures – and I don't know, I would consider True Detective 2 – but when we tell someone to set an air date, rather than letting the script find its natural resting place when it's ready, when it baked, we failed,” Lombardo reflected. “Nick Pizzolatto… is a soulful writer,” he continued. “I think we said, 'Great.' And I take the blame. At that point, I became too much of a network leader. We were a huge success. “Gee, I’d love to do this again next year…” So guess what? I set him up.”
By then, the second season of True Detective had become prestige television's most cautionary tale. By moving the action from Louisiana to suburban Los Angeles, we took all the worst qualities of the original version and amplified them. There was a convoluted storyline about stolen diamonds, intergenerational revenge, and—somehow shoehorned in—high-class orgies. He could not be saved, even despite the excellent performances of Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell.
Having adopted the persona of a lone author, Pizzolatto discovered that it is a very long journey when you yourself are on the edge. He grew up poor in the same southern Louisiana backcountry that he later brought to life so eerily in telling the story of Hart and Cole. After working several minimum wage jobs and taking a creative writing course at the University of Arkansas, his breakthrough came in The Atlantic, where he published several short stories.
Her debut novel, Galveston, was published in 2010. At this point, he became an object of interest in the television industry (an adaptation of Galveston starring Elle Fanning). and Ben Foster was released in 2018).
He was always drawn to television. Still, when he was a poor suburban kid, breaking into the entertainment industry seemed like a fantasy. It wasn't until one of his scripts fell into the hands of McConaughey, who was then trying to move away from rom-coms, that True Detective became a reality.
“This is ridiculous,” is how Pizzolatto reacted to his film. a chance to write for television someday. “You might as well say you want to be a movie star. [G]rew up in south Louisiana, attended public school and worked two jobs… I spent four years bartending in Austin. I never had any money or a window into the world of television.”
At the end of its second season, True Detective felt like it had crashed and burned. As a result, plans to build a third were shelved. The series finally premiered in 2019, starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as a police officer investigating a crime in northwest Arkansas in the 1980s (the action straddles the past and present).
Jodie Foster and Cali Reyes in True Detective: Nightland Photo: HBO
This time everything was going to be different. Before giving the green light, HBO insisted that Pizzolatto be more open to collaboration. He was specifically asked to share the burden of writing the script with outside writers (two co-writers, along with Pizzolatto, received credit – Deadwood creator David Milch and Graham Gordy).
However, rumors of Pizzolatto's sweet side were exaggerated. Before True Detective 3 began, it was announced that Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room, Hold the Dark) would direct the first three episodes. Citing “planning for conflicts,” he left after overseeing only two. Rumor had it that Pizzolatto remained a strong creator who liked to hold the wheel in his hands.
Not everyone was ready to condemn him – or True Detective's second year. Some argued that Pizzolatto was unfairly judged compared to what he achieved working with McConaughey and Harrelson. John Crowley, who directed the finale before his success with the historical romance Brooklyn, felt that TD2's strengths would take a while to emerge.
“I got a lot of good and bad feedback,” he told me when I interrupted an interview promoting Brooklyn to ask him about True Detective in 2015. “I tried to keep my head down. I don't take it personally. Going into work, I knew it would be a rocky road because the first episode was such a phenomenon. When the second series was announced, bloggers went crazy.
“So I knew it wouldn't be a good shake-up, that it could be a shaky journey. The point is that you don't do work to be praised by critics, you do it because it's interesting. The series immediately found its feet – it became richer, deeper. You had to invest money in travel. A certain part of the people did not want to do this.”
True Detective: Nightland is a spooky winter gift for fans of the first season. Showrunner Lopez has returned to the horror saga's roots with the thriller, which she describes as a “negative take” on the first True Detective. “Where True Detective is male and sweaty, Nightland is cold and dark and female,” she told Vanity Fair.
For Pizzolatto, life went on. He traded Los Angeles for Austin, Texas, divorced and remarried (country singer Suzanne Santo). He was also busy writing. One of the projects he's trying to get off the ground is Easy Waltz, “an original film I'm planning to make with Vince Vaughn playing a singer in Las Vegas.” Pizzolatto has also completed the screenplay for The Grass Rifles, an Amazon “original Western series” that is expected to be in the same gritty spirit as Kevin Costner's Yellowstone.
And he wrote “The Frenchman” – a Euro-thriller based on the novel by Jack Beaumont. However, he warned fans not to get ahead of themselves.
“All of these projects require millions of dollars and the market being what it is, I can't guarantee you'll actually be able to watch all (or some) of them, but the wheels are already in motion,” he wrote on Instagram. “This is all to reassure the fans here that I am not retired and that I am creating energetic but not super-dark stories of murder and retribution.”
Pizzolatto confronts Pizzolatto in his social media posts s as ironic, self-confident and, if not entirely calm, then certainly not a writer haunted by demons. At 48, he may have learned to relax. He's even put aside his previous aversion to the supernatural and is writing a script for indie studio Blumhouse, best known for its numerous reboots of the Halloween franchise.
On top of all this, he's working with TD3 star Mahershala. The film “Ali on the Blade” from Marvel. This film tells the story of a half-vampire living among humans – a dark spirit who has learned to coexist with people and endure daylight. Pizzolatto knows exactly how Blade feels. Ten years after True Detective, the story Pizzolatto is about to tell for Marvel is also his.
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