WHEN THE FIRST SEASON OF TRUE DETECTIVE APPEARED IN 2014, we were living in a different era of television—before auteur series and anthologies were commonplace, when seeing movie stars on the small screen still meant something, when a writer’s or a director’s vision could be so novel as to draw millions to their proverbial water coolers. It wasn’t just a buttoned-up Woody Harrelson and a gaunt and philosophical Matthew McConaughey that lured us in, but the layered timelines, the potentially cosmic intrigue, Nic Pizzolatto’s indulgent verbosity, and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s absorbing camera.
Now, a decade later, with the appearance of ’s fourth season—its first without Pizzolatto at the helm and its first with a subtitle, —movie stars and auteurist directors are no longer novel. Since ’s debut in 2014, we’ve had Clive Owen and Steven Soderbergh (), Jude Law and Paolo Sorrentino (), Alicia Vikander and Olivier Assayas (). Spike Lee, Baz Luhrmann, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Barry Jenkins, Park Chan-wook, and Steve Mc-Queen have all directed television series; Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon have starred in several. High-production values have become a cliché. The fourth season’s first puzzle, then, is how to make itself anew: Can ’s creator, director, and primary writer, Issa López, give us something bracing and different that?
