unabridged thoughts ⁽⁴⁾

As a writer, director, and producer, Chris Carter is best known for creating The X-Files, first a show and now a 30-year franchise that plucked a tense cord deep in the psyche of Generation X. This success has had a totalizing effect on Carter’s public image - either you know him as the X-Files guy, or you have no idea who he is. And indeed, aside from his monster hit, his filmography consists almost exclusively of abject failures and weird experiments. One gets the impression that he’s the sort of guy who lives in the shadow of his single jackpot idea and never managed to bottle that lightning a second time. But Chris Carter did create one other show that seemed, for a time, to have a life of its own. And that show was Millennium. At its best, Millennium was as good as anything else then on network television. At its worst, it was an embarrassing descent into paranoid community theater. Taken as a whole, while ahead of its time, it is hard to recommend today. This is especially true given modern sensibilities and the higher level of media literacy that now pervades popular culture. Despite this, I think…

There’s no end, it seems, to my thinking about True Detective (Season One, Season Two). And let me tell you, I have a lot of thoughts about Season Three. Let’s get the bottom line out of the way: Season Three is better than Season One, and might be the best season of television in the entirety of the Streaming Era (which I mark as beginning in 2013). As I’ve noted before, every season of the show thus far embraces the sensibilities of a different genre of fiction. The overarching theme of Season Three is true crime. You might object that true crime is a non-fiction genre, and thus not an appropriate label for a television drama, but I contend that the fictive, fictionalizing qualities of true crime are at the heart of what this season is doing. After a tepid response from critics, backlash from fans, and subsequent disappearance into the Streaming Era’s rapidly expanding memory hole, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto and the HBO studio execs appear to have conceded that perhaps a season a year wasn’t going to be possible without cutting a lot of corners. They weren’t alone in this feeling, and we have since seen fewer and fewer…

Continuing my meandering thread on Season One (see also my subsequent thoughts on Season Three), we pick up just one year later, in 2015. Much has changed for showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, who has shot from the margins of television writing into the limelight, at the helm of a show that many consider a new industry benchmark. However, while expectations and scrutiny are now high, one person doing all the writing certainly isn’t going to be any easier. Furthermore, Pizzolatto has lost an important creative partner. Cary Joji Fukanaga, who directed all eight episodes of the first season (and who almost certainly deserves a lot of the credit for the visual and tonal consistency of that season’s episodes, as well as its strong, nuanced performances), has moved on to greener pastures. Under pressure from HBO to turn around a second season to be released a mere 15 months after the finale of the first season, Pizzolatto will ultimately compromise on both of these unusual qualities from Season One. Once the chips are down, Pizzolatto will share writing credit with Scott Lasser, and the season’s eight episodes will employ six different directors. Viewed coldly from well into its future, we can point…

(Big exhale) OK, let’s do this. Below: Season One. Elsewhere, Season Two and Season Three. In its structure and superficies, True Detective is a crime drama developed in an anthology format. While later seasons very occasionally make callbacks to earlier seasons, each season is effectively an independent narrative. This independence runs deep: If a critic gently excises the murder mystery that functions as the beating heart of the show’s three seasons to date, we discover that each seasons belongs to a different genre. At the center of this web is Nic Pizzolatto, showrunner and (in theory) sole writer for all three seasons. To speak further about this season of television and its creative choices, we need to acknowledge how deeply unusual it is for high-budget prestige drama television to get penned by a single writer, even more so for someone with a little experience as Pizzolatto had when the first season was greenlit. Two reasons why this is rare: (1) A season of television is a huge amount of writing. If we use the script for the pilot episode as a yardstick, it’s reasonable to extrapolate that the 8-episode first season weighs in at around 100,000 words of script (if…