B+
True Detective: “Omega Station”
Most of the official images released ahead of this season finale show its characters sitting in thought, hands together…
True Detective
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…
A
True Detective: “The Secret Fate Of All Life”
If you felt like the big raid at the end of “Who Goes There” was a turning point for True Detective, good work—here’s a…
A
True Detective: “Who Goes There”
For the most part, True Detective has avoided scenes like the one that concludes “Who Goes There.” It’s a thriller, but…
A-
True Detective: “The Locked Room”
Withholding information must be one of the most challenging aspects of cultivating a mystery like the one at the center…
B+
True Detective: “Seeing Things”
From a nuts and bolts description of True Detective, there’s not much that makes the series sound exceptional. Literary…
B
True Detective: “The Long Bright Dark”
The only female presence in the first eight minutes of True Detective is a corpse. This isn’t as damning as it sounds,…
B+
True Detective avoids pulp in favor of philosophy
The trick to appreciating True Detective is understanding that it’s being sold as something quite different from what…