With Jodie Foster in the main role as the police chief investigating a strange murder, you can expect a strong performance and a captivating TV show.
Given the high standards set by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season, it’s no ordinary challenge. Foster pulls it off, obviously, imbuing her surly character with the requisite surliness and smarts to solve a puzzling murder – while battling the small-town politics in Alaska and her own difficult teenage step-daughter.
Each season of the True Detective series is a self-contained crime that is presented, and later, solved. Collectively it is a masterful use of an established TV brand to keep viewers coming back for the next season. It’s smart. Many of the crime series are really only one-season stories. Unless you establish a principal character (Bosch, etc) and build multiple seasons around it, how do you tackle it?
The True Detective model has been a very, very good attempt.
Part of the reason is the calibre of actors for each season.
Apart from McConaughey and Harrelson, the first season also features the solid Clarke Peters and Michelle Monaghan. The two detectives’ personal demons and conflicts are a fascinating subplot to the horror murder they investigated years before.
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Season two stars Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and the underrated Taylor Kitsch. Often cast as a pretty boy, Kitsch has enough strong performances under this belt to disavow that characterisation, not least as SA’s own Greg Marinovich in The Bang Bang Club. It also features David Morse and Vince Vaughn.
Stephen Dorff leads the cast for season three.
In season four, Jodie Foster plays a good cop, as we know from her breakout role in The Silence of the Lambs. She gives as well as always. She manages to portray the conflicts of her job and her life as a mother. She is a rough character with little patience for societal norms but a good instinct for police work. In other words, the perfect tortured cop just trying to make the world a better place by solving one crime at a time.
This time it’s in Ennis, Alaska, where the sun literally doesn’t shine for several months. The crime Foster must investigate while managing her difficult step-daughter involves a troublesome former cop she fired (the up-and-coming Kali Reis) and is now in another police force. The excellent Fiona Shaw plays a wonderful cameo.
True Detective has found a great model for making good television with independent seasons that dig into disturbing crimes, using rockstar actors in each season.
