Let’s get this out of the way at the onset: “True Detective” is kind of dumb. I watched the first season and have seen the first three episodes of the second (and will continue to watch the rest when they air on HBO this summer), but that doesn’t mean I think the show is particularly intelligent, no matter how hard it tries. “True Detective” is engaging if shallow, the David Baldacci of golden-age television. And the show is still very macho, and still very much obsessed with the philosophical musings emanating from the brain of brushed-denim-clad bro-runner Nic Pizzolatto. But you should still watch it. Because seriously, now that “Mad Men” is over, what else are you going to watch when you’re bored on Sunday night?Much of the hype around the first season of “True Detective” was focused on its cast — Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson — and its limited-run format. This was not an ongoing series but a one-off, with a beginning, middle, and end. There were no cliffhangers — once it was done it was done. But it became popular so naturally HBO signed up for another round, reconfiguring the show as an anthology series, where the cast would change each season. The only thing that remained was Pizzolatto, the show’s writer.Unfortunately, the writing was always the worst part of “True Detective.” But here’s what’s surprising about the new season: it’s actually, so far, a little better than the first. Swapping the sweltering heat of Louisiana’s swampland for the smoky and toxic expanse of Southern California was a wise choice, and removes some of the backwoods stereotypes that plagued the first season. And the cast — Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch — are better in action than they look on paper. Of course they are given some cringe-worthy corny lines of dialogue, but for the most part, the actors are left alone, free to explore the quiet, brooding nature of their characters.The quasi-mystical plot elements of the first season have been replaced with even more hardboiled bromides. Detective Ray Velcoro (a soft-in-the-middle Farrell) is a former city cop who has a long and dirty history. He now works in the fictional town of Vinci, California, where he struggles with his ex-wife over custody of their child and does jobs on the side for Frank Semyon (a gaunt Vaughn), a former criminal trading a life of back room illegality for the more legitimate life of municipal crime. Messing with his plan to enter the straight-and-narrow is the disappearance of the city manager, Semyon’s business partner on a deal that was to promise them millions in the future development of a railroad line. The city manager’s vanishing brings together Velcoro and Detective Ani Bezzerides (McAdams), a tough county investigator with a commune-guru father, and Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a former solider and current highway patrolman who was recently suspended for being accused of exchanging a free pass on a traffic ticket for sexual favors. Each officer has a troubled past, and their respective offices have specific agendas that are at odds. They get deeper into the investigation and a simple case becomes more complicated as the web of corruption spreads to all corners of the city, possibly even involving the police force.This plot sounds like a million other things you’ve seen — missing-persons case, stubborn cops with troubled pasts, corrupt police force — but that is part of the show’s charm. It’s simple and straight-forward, and finally not trying to be something it’s not capable of constructing. There’s less characters staring at the stars and contemplating the cosmos and more people with drinking problems snorting cocaine in dimly lit bars. Which is cliché but not hokey.If anything, the new version of “True Detective” resembles “Chinatown” as written by Ross Macdonald (with a dash of Charles Bukowski’s vulgarity). It’s heat-stroked and soured on humanity, pure bitter California-noir. We’ll see what happens with the rest of the season. The beauty of television is that something can be good for three hours and horrible for the next five, or the reverse. The show could return to the dorm-room spirituality of the first season; one episode could feature Colin Farrell staring pensively out the window of his car while driving down the highway (actually, I would completely watch that). But as it stands now, the first couple of hours of “True Detective” are off to a decent start. It may not be great, but really, what is on television anymore?
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