Critical Condition: True Detective

In the second season, which premieres Monday (SoHo, 5.30/8.30), three police officers and a career criminal must navigate a web of conspiracy in the aftermath of a murder. Colin Farrell plays Ray Velcoro, a compromised detective whose allegiances are torn between his masters in a corrupt police department and the mobster who owns him, while Vince Vaughn is set to play Frank Semyon, a career criminal in danger of losing his empire when his move into legitimate enterprise is upended by the murder of a business partner. Rachael McAdams also stars as Ani Bezzerides, a Ventura County Sheriff’s detective whose uncompromising ethics put her at odds with others and the system she serves, while Taylor Kitsch stars as Paul Woodrugh, a war veteran and motorcycle officer for the California Highway Patrol, running from a difficult past and the sudden glare of a scandal that never happened.

“HBO’s neo-noir crime mystery franchise returns with a new cast, new city, new era, new case and new look. But the switch to Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn instead of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey has left one detail intact. It’s still the kind of show that makes TV viewers reach for phrases like ‘golden age of television drama’. The second installment of True Detective goes out of the way not to echo the first. Acclaim for that inaugural season is still ringing every awards show in the Western world.As drama, though, the new True is in the same league.” — New York Daily News.

“Season one had two stars in the lead roles. Now there are four. That’s a lot of star power and screen charisma, but all four leads wander in a haze of gloom so unrelenting and indistinguishable that it is almost comical; their lives are master classes in misery that make the novels of James Ellroy seem like Dr Seuss stories … There isn’t as much versatility and contrast, but the new season has evocative scenes of its own. These are seedy, small-time cops and robbers, but their story is sometimes ennobled with almost startling touches of visual grandeur.” — New York Times.

“True Detective’s second go-around benefits greatly from a re-start. Fans should find themselves content with the show’s intensely dour mood and a story flecked with sexual deviance, grim violence and assorted weirdness that seems at least partly inspired by David Lynch movies … Instead of hillbilly/cult worship perversion, this time it involves fetish nightclubs, sex-trafficking and purveyors of high-end flesh — which guarantees that most of the supporting roles and bit parts here for women will be of the whore variety.” — The Washington Post.

“True Detective‘s second season employs the same flashback and time-jump elements as season one, but not nearly as confusingly, which is a bonus in the early episodes. It does, however, set up a complicated game of trust and allegiances — and the entirety of the first episode is spent a little too emphatically letting viewers know that everybody involved here is broken in some way. There’s a heavy-handedness to the direction that raises some early red flags: The stylised coolness starts to feel a bit overdone. An eye-rolling final shot in the first hour looks excessively ominous.” — The Hollywood Reporter.

“Impeccably cast around its marquee stars, the new plot possesses the requisite noir-ish qualities, but feels like a by-the-numbers potboiler, punctuated by swooping aerial shots of LA courtesy of new director Justin Lin, whose intense close-ups bring to mind a Sergio Leone western. Although generally watchable, the inspiration that turned the first into an obsession for many seems to have drained out of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s prose, at least three hours into this eight-episode run.” — Variety.