When streamers started dropping entire seasons of a TV show all at once, it took me a while to get used to it. I’m older (old school?) and miss the days of water-cooler TV: The shows that dropped weekly on either network or cable that we would really dig into the next day at work. From THE SOPRANOS to LOST to BREAKING BAD to the original season of TRUE DETECTIVE. But now that I’m 3 episodes in, I have to admit… TRUE DETECTIVE NIGHT COUNTRY plays so much better for me as a binge.
Has the world of Instagram and TikTok ruined my ability to pay attention to a show so densely packed with details that just blinking makes the rest not make sense? I enjoyed the premiere but felt PARTS 2 & 3 were lackluster to me on first watch. So I went back and watched all three in one sitting and it made ALL the difference. TRUE DETECTIVE is not a show to put on while you do your taxes or eat dinner. My 😊turned into a 🤩. Turn off your phone notifications, put the kids to bed, and pay attention.
PART 3 brought a few more answers to this season’s mystery and a lot more questions. Just enough to keep us teasing us along and wanting more. Now, while I’m not giving this the highest score I could here, it was still much better than watching the episode by itself. It’s a high 😊, but still a 😊. Kali Reiss (Evangeline Navarro) and Jodie Foster (Liz Danvers) are perfectly cast to have just enough chemistry to allow their characters to work together while remaining adversaries. Two women from very different backgrounds, each with their reasons to want to solve these murders. Danvers is loyal to her duty as an officer, while Navarro’s reasons are far more personal.
So what wasn’t perfect about it for me? Two things. First, I’m not feeling the push to make this something fantastical. There’s got to be an explanation for all of the strangeness that’s afoot in Ennis Alaska, right? The story is pushing us to believe that whatever the answer is, it’s otherworldly. For a show that’s been grounded in reality so far, I hope the mystery doesn’t resolve to be about ghosts or monsters or aliens. PART 3 is a slower episode than the first two, except for the final seconds. This is common in a lot of TV dramas, especially those with ongoing mysteries. If you keep me super interested all episode and then add a jaw-dropper in the last seconds, that’s fine. But if the rest of the episode isn’t perfect, it always feels like a copout.
TRUE DETECTIVE NIGHT COUNTRY airs Sunday nights on HBO and streams on Max the same night.
