A-
True Detective's finale starts with a bluff, then tells a new story
“Now Am Found” delivers everything I expected from a True Detective finale: two hardbitten men having a ta…
True Detective
B+
True Detective promises heavy lifting but shrugs off its weightiest issues
“The Final Country” feels like it’s breaking new ground showing teenage Becca Hays (Deborah Ayorinde) as Wayne drives…
B+
6 episodes in, True Detective digs into story but squanders opportunities
“It’s terrible what this work makes you ponder, isn’t it?”
At a 1990 reading from Life And Death And The Harvest Moon,…
B
True Detective is playing with puzzles instead of exploring mysteries
“You shouldn’t have seen that. Try and forget it.” That’s what Roland West says after Tom Purcell walks in on photos of…
B-
True Detective forces confrontations and falls a little flat
In 2015, former detective Wayne Hays stands in his former police station, waiting for his son. He uses every tool in…
B-
True Detective trots out a new bag of toys and tricks
“Are you awakening to what you withheld?”
B+
Mahershala Ali graces the weight of True Detective with his gravity
“It’s too dark, man!” “I don’t care.”
C+
Mahershala Ali soars, but a third True Detective can’t escape the show’s past
A prospective Oscar frontrunner stars in an HBO mystery directed by a festival-circuit hotshot, about a murder in a…
B+
True Detective: “Omega Station”
Most of the official images released ahead of this season finale show its characters sitting in thought, hands together…
A-
True Detective: “Black Maps And Motel Rooms”
It’s the pieces you take your eye off of that get you in the end. The second season of True Detective should know that…
B-
True Detective: “Church In Ruins”
After all the allusions to The King In Yellow and the Carcosa mythos, many viewers were disappointed that the first…
C
True Detective: “Other Lives”
If we’re supposed to treat the first two seasons of True Detective as distinct organisms, a pair of unique stories that…
B-
True Detective: “Down Will Come”
The closing shootout of “Down Will Come” is the second round of True Detective in a nutshell. As the detail wastes ammo…
B+
True Detective: “Maybe Tomorrow”
Tonight, HBO offers another lesson to aspiring TV coroners everywhere: Don’t declare a character dead until you’ve seen…
B-
True Detective: “Night Finds You”
All is not well in Frank Semyon’s inland empire. He can’t sleep. There’s water damage on the bedroom ceiling. He has to…
C-
True Detective struggles to go straight
“Why would I do another buddy-cop show?” asks True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto in a recent Vanity Fair profile. “I…
A-
True Detective: “Form And Void”
In the end, there is only the darkness and the light. There is no Rustin Cohle, there is no Martin Hart. There’s not a…
C
True Detective: “After You’ve Gone”
Marty Hart has committed the most egregious sin in the Book of Male Antihero: He’s gone ordinary. In the parlance of…
B+
True Detective: “Haunted Houses”
The big cosmic joke that True Detective is playing involves turning anyone who’s watching the show too closely into…