True Detective: Night Country (2024)

Lots of things to like about the latest HBO True Detective season, Night Country (they seem to be burping them up now at about the rate of every five years): a solid cast, featuring Jodie Foster with Kali Weiss, John Hawkes, and more good players. A terrific setting in Ennis, Alaska, within the Arctic Circle, at the time of year (late December and Christmas) when there is no daylight. And an interesting, bizarre, and unsettling mystery, in which all the scientists in a remote research post have gone missing. Some great music too. There are ultimately a lot of moving parts to the story, chief among them strands from a nearby environmentally damaging mining operation and Alaskan Natives opposed to it. A lot of history stalks the tenuous relationships in Ennis. In the early going Night Country throws off vibes from John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing and it often flirts with the supernatural, settling into indigenous spirituality. For once I caught wind of the series in time and/or in the right mood to follow along with the whole thing real-time. I did some of that with Succession too last spring, although that was prefaced with binging the first three and a half seasons. From the two experiences I have to say binging may be the better way to go for me. Night Country has lots of twists and turns, lots of intricacies in the personal relationships as well as the mystery, and lots of red herrings and confusion. Six episodes may not be enough to build momentum, although that’s kind of a TV series perspective. Let’s face it, it’s six hours. Maybe I just wanted it to go in some other direction. But I ended up underwhelmed by Night Country. It has a pretty good windup and payoff, I could see that, so I’m wondering if I just should have waited and binged it. Pretty weak recommendation, I suspect. Maybe you could binge it and report back how it looks. I saw a lot of good in it that might have cohered better if it were more concentrated instead of spread out across weeks. But now in a way I’m complaining about the terms of TV entertainment itself.