Like the patsies and suckers we all are, we fell for it again. “True Detective” just screwed us, exactly as did “Lost,” and “The Killing,” and “Heroes,” and “Battlestar Galactica,” and “Damages,” and, and, and, and . . .
HBO’s fancy-pants pseudo-existentialist white-trash-bashing cop show spent seven hours setting up a big finish. Then, like its predecessors, it finked out in the finale.
For the umpteenth time, a serialized television melodrama featuring an elaborate mystery involving a diabolical conspiracy simply refused to follow the elementary rule of mysteries: It left us hanging. It didn’t solve the puzzle.
“True Detective” is the first series in years to seize the excited attention of elites and regular folk both (11 million viewers weekly on a pay channel, which is a huge rating) and generate what used to be called “water-cooler” conversation — which now takes place not in office hallways but on Twitter and in the comments sections of episode summaries.
Brilliantly acted by Woody Harrelson and this year’s It Boy, Matthew McConaughey, “True Detective” seemed to have figured out how to create a thematically consistent and complete TV event that wouldn’t fall prey to the “Lost” and “Twin Peaks” disease.
Those shows, and the others, were written by people who (we learned along the way) had absolutely no idea where they were going with the stories they were telling. They layered mystery upon mystery, added new characters and new twists, made themselves more and more baroque — and plunged into creative downward spirals as they got further afield from the central conundrum.
“Who killed Laura Palmer?” was the “Twin Peaks” question, which the show refused to answer at the end of its first season except to present us with a bearded guy named Bob whom we’d never seen before stomping over some furniture into the camera.
“What’s the secret of the island?” was the “Lost” question, which ended up showing us all the characters ascending into heaven together without ever explaining the polar bear, the hatch, the fact that children couldn’t be born there, the guy who seemed to live forever . . . (Some Internet obsessive actually counted 87 mysteries left unresolved by “Lost.”)
“Battlestar Galactica” explained in its opening credits that humanoid robots determined to wipe out the entirety of the human race “have a plan.” Or it did until Season Four, when the “have a plan” thing was simply deleted from the opening credits because they didn’t have a plan and neither did the writers.
“True Detective” promised to avoid all that. The series limited itself to eight hours. It was written by one man, Nic Pizzolatto, who had never done TV before but had published a well-received novel. In interviews, Pizzolatto criticized those earlier shows and said he didn’t believe in hanging the audience out to dry.
All his clues pointed to a vast conspiracy involving a series of Christian schools, a meth lab, a well-connected Evangelical pastor and his US senator cousin and some kind of voodoo-Satanic ritual shrine whose high priest was a figure called “The Yellow King.”
But when the “True Detective” finale was all done, after the two cops had destroyed their own lives either hiding from the crimes or pursuing them obsessively, the mystery turned out to center on a guy with scars on a lawn mower living in a ruined mansion we only saw once at the tail end of the seventh episode.
No Yellow King. No explanation for the weird coughing fits and seemingly supernatural guidance being offered by crazed survivors of the conspiracy. No connections (except on a single piece of paper we barely saw) to all the powerful people covering up the Satanic cult. Just one sweaty psychopath.
No book editor of Pizzolatto’s would have published “True Detective” in novel form if he hadn’t tied up the loose ends. But HBO felt free to go ahead and spend millions on a promise made but not fulfilled. It could only do so because it knew we TV viewers had allowed ourselves to be played for fools before.
But why? Why? Why did they do it, why do they do it and why do we let them do it to us — again and again and again?