Our own Erik Adams hints at frustrating times ahead in his pre-air review, but last night’s two-part season premiere of True Detective, directed by Green Room and Hold The Dark’s Jeremy Saulnier, was pretty darn exciting. Series creator Nic Pizzolatto is certainly excited, telling Entertainment Weekly that, after several years away, the premiere of season three has him “feeling generative and want[ing] to keep that momentum going — if I’m allowed to.”
He’s also got an idea for a fourth season of the show which he describes as “really, really wild”—although he won’t share exactly what that idea is. He adds, “Where do you even go after this [season]? … But I have an idea that’s kind of crazy. I think it needs to percolate for a while. I was looking to do another series, maybe a movie, in the meantime, but yeah. I have an idea.”
As for whether Pizzolatto will be “allowed” to make this mysterious, wild idea happen—alien abductions in ‘50s North Dakota? Satanic garbage collectors in Tennessee in the summer of 1999?—that will depend on how the rest of the season plays with viewers and in the ratings. As the drop-off between the first and second seasons showed, good direction can make the difference between an engrossing and a boring episode of True Detective; Saulnier’s out as of episode two, with The X-Files and The Americans director Daniel Sackheim (eps. three, six, seven, and eight), as well as Pizzolatto himself (eps. four and five), handling directorial duties for the remainder of the season.