There is a small legion of people who absolutely love season 2. I am one of them. Judge me all you like. That being said; I'm just glad the show is returning.
Agreed. Was season 2 great? Yes. Did TD set an unreaslitically high bar with season 1? You're god damn right. I will still stack TD season 2 against most any and all shows. It's hard to follow something as perfect as season 1 and not get shit on. It was still good IMHO.
Because media outlets trashed it mercilessly from the outset and sold the public on it being rubbish before viewers ever even gave it a chance. And the fact that audiences made up their minds they didn't like it after watching it for 10 minutes after reading all the shitty reviews, It just wasn't a series of television most people today can find the attention span for. It didn't have the more in your face tropes like the first season did. No Woody and Matthew, No Lovecraft, Nobody reading edgy Thomas Ligotti quotes in the car, No eerie Louisiana bayou atmosphere. Basically just making excuses for the supposed lack in quality, apologizing for the media scorn it took and not doing the same season over again to keep people happy.
To be clear, you believe a media-led campaign against the show forced the president of HBO to apologize for how shitty it was? You find that more plausible than the idea that the show just wasn't very good? Why do you think the media conspired against this one season of a particular show?
Season 2 fucking sucked. I never read a single negative (or positive) review and formed this opinion on my own while watching the entire season (each episode twice usually). I wanted it to be good and a few times I thought/hoped it was about to get good but unfortunately it never happened. GTFO with it wasn't good b/c the media told us it wasn't.
We hosted friends every Sunday to watch the show because we all liked S1 so much. By episode 4 everyone but my wife and I had given up on it entirely.
I didn't read any reviews and don't even think i participated in the TMB thread for S2 because there just wasn't anything worth talking about... it was shitty television. fucking hilarious to pawn off badly written script and even worse acting on media bias. Vince Vaughn was an enormous casting mistake. He can play a funny condescending asshole and an underachieving, down-on-his-luck RomCom boyfriend. That is fucking it. Mafia boss isn't in his repertoire and he ruined every scene he was in trying to "be hard" They also had way too much story to tell for the amount of time allotted in the season. The first ~4 episodes were like world-building on bath salts.
I didn't mind VV that much, it was the lazy writing and storytelling that was painful. They almost saved it with the penultimate episode, but when the finale happened, it was like a tidal wave of bloody stool.
The inciting incident was Riggins going out for a ride to kill himself and randomly stumbling onto a body that'd been driven around for an hour. That's objectively dogshit writing.
True Detective season 2 standalone was decent, but nothing was going to live up to season 1. Season 3 has an easy task: tell a better story than season 2. That's simple.
First: After a season spent in Los Angeles, the show is returning to its rural season 1 roots. The next round, starring a previously announced Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), will be set in the Ozarks. Ali will play the lead role of Wayne Hays, a state police detective from Northwest Arkansas. Also, we have a logline: “The next installment of True Detective tells the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks, and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods.”
That's quite ambitious but I have faith in the writers to get their groove back and Saulnier is a perfect match for these dirty and nasty types of stories.