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Welcome to Episodic Medium’s daily coverage of True Detective: Night Country, which debuted tonight on HBO. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available to paid subscribers. You can check out our full Winter 2024 schedule here, and learn more about the site and its mission on our About page.

Exactly 10 years ago to the day, HBO debuted a new show called True Detective. Starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, it was more or less an instant sensation: A blood-and-sweat-slicked neo-noir of a crime drama with intimations of conspiracy, supernatural mysticism, and stoned-college-sophomore philosophizing, it provided some of the most robust extracurricular rabbit holes for viewers to fall into since Lost. Century-old mythological texts, cosmic horror, and a steady supply of cult references made for a rich stew into which the show’s bifurcated timeline and ambitious gloss on a serial-killer plot could set up shop. Creator Nic Pizzolatto knew what he was doing—it was genre-mixing fun that nevertheless kept both feet planted firmly in the hardboiled-detective terra firma that it so successfully updated for a conspiracy-loving twenty-first century.

But True Detective’s highbrow labeling was always a bit disingenuous. As my old colleague Erik Adams said in his review of the second-season premiere, “Despite the sheen of prestige provided by the A-list stars, the stylist behind the camera, and the former lit professor writing the scripts, True Detective has always had a heart of trash.” Erik labeled it “flowery pulp,” and I have yet to see a more accurate definition of the series. Indeed, “flowery pulp” is a term that could apply to the overwhelming majority of critically acclaimed spins in genre territory, whether it’s the fancy version of a lurid serial-killer mystery (Silence Of The Lambs) or a rape-revenge tale transplanted from the streets (where Abel Ferrera perfected it) to the more reputable setting of a courtroom (The Accused). True Detective, with its sophisticated reworking of proudly lowbrow tropes, fits right in.

It’s no coincidence that Jodie Foster stars in both of the aforementioned examples of “flowery pulp.” She made her career by delivering killer performances in artful twists on vulgar material, and it’s arguably the defining throughline of her acting filmography: From Taxi Driver to Accused to Silence to Contact to Panic Room to Flightplan to The Brave One to Elysium, and now True Detective—in more ways than one, her turn in this revival of the series feels like the actor coming home.

And she’s not the only one. The show itself feels like it’s coming full circle, returning to the foundations that made its first season so satisfying. After a season two in which the mystical and mystery elements were ultimately almost incidental to the character studies that drove the story, and a years-later third season whose most lasting impression is little more than, "Boy, Mahershala Ali is a very good actor, isn’t he?”, Night Country feels—at least in this season premiere—like it’s nailing everything that made True Detective cool in the first place. Everything, that is, as though it were inverted, a funhouse-mirror reflection of the testosterone-fueled debut season.

Credit where credit’s due: This is an Issa López joint. The Mexican writer-director, best known for the fantasy-horror hit Tigers Are Not Afraid, takes the reins from Pizzolatto and doesn’t miss a beat, using the framework the series creator established to put her own spin on every element, from the distaff version of its central mismatched-cops dynamic to the icy darkness of Alaska replacing the sun-drenched heat of season one’s Louisiana setting. Wisely, she avoids attempting to repeat McConaughey’s lightning-in-a-bottle narrator performance or the knotty time-jumping, instead letting her scripts and camerawork (she wrote and directed all six episodes) slowly reveal the bleak secrets and mysteries of Ennis, Alaska to the audience and characters at the same time.

And what a juicy mystery it is. A research facility populated entirely by men (coincidence? I think not) is entering the third day of no sunlight (the northernmost region of the state, above the Arctic Circle, loses daylight for upwards of two months during winter), when the entire team of researchers disappears, mid-screening of a DVD of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The only noteworthy clue left for police Captain Liz Danvers (Foster) to discover during her initial search of the place (along with John Hawkes’ detective Hank Prior and Finn Bennett’s deputy/Hank’s son, Peter) is a severed human tongue, quickly deduced to be that of an Indigenous woman. Like the ear found at the start of Blue Velvet, the tongue is symbolic of a darker, more mysterious world hiding under the surface of a community’s sunny veneer—but unlike that one, Ennis is no cookie-cutter suburb. The sun has gone; darkness is already swallowing the surface. People don’t talk about certain things here. And if you try, well… there’s a reason it’s a tongue.

Which would already be unsettling, but it mirrors a clue from the brutal slaying of an Indigenous activist woman years earlier, whose tongue was also cut out, and whose murder went unsolved at the time, leading to the demotion of detective Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) after she failed to solve the case, but couldn’t let it go. Now a workaday trooper, Navarro gets word of the situation—and the tongue—and immediately gets back to the cold case, convinced there’s a connection with the missing researchers. (To be fair, two cases involving a severed tongue in the same small town is an awfully big coincidence.) And despite her blustery talk, Danvers begrudgingly lets Navarro stick around, perhaps knowing too well what that kind of unresolved frustration can do to a person.

This premiere does a solid job of sketching in the personalities of these two women, both of whom take multiple opportunities to demonstrate they would basically rather talk about anything else but what they’re feeling, or confront painful realities—at least until the pair are stuck together, when it becomes clear that these frenemies may be the only ones each other can rely on to understand what’s going through their heads. Reis may be an acting newbie, but you wouldn’t know it from this. The scenes between her and Foster pop with a kinetic frisson—it’s an easy and unforced chemistry that immediately explains why the show cast the former boxing star opposite the Oscar winner. And when they’re butting heads, it’s with an undercurrent of connection that prevents things from descending into bickering, even when the script errs too far in that direction.

Mostly, I’m impressed at how effectively all the table-setting gets integrated into the plot during this inaugural hour. We learn about the uneasy politics of Ennis and the local mine—a town controversy that cost the earlier victim, Annie, her life. We get enough of their backstories and see the ways that both Danvers and Navarro have tried to create walls between themselves and the other people in their lives, to varying degrees of ineffectiveness. We learn about Navarro’s sister, struggling with mental illness, and Danvers’ awkwardly familial bond with Peter—a bond that feels easier and more natural than the one she’s struggling to create with her adopted daughter, Leah (Isabella Star Lablanc, doing a lot with a little). And as if Leah making sex tapes with her underage partner isn’t uncomfortable enough, we also make time for the lives of supporting characters like Peter and Hank—the latter getting a mail-order bride, and the former getting handjobs mere feet away from his son, Darwin. (I’m reading that scene right, yeah? I felt like we were supposed to find that endearing, and all I kept thinking was, “Dude, your kid is in the next room with an open door.”)

And all of that is before we start to talk about the potential mystical angle. López has been very open in interviews about the fact that she wanted the supernatural elements to feel both vital and an open question—in other words, don’t expect the series to come down on the side of either realism or mysticism. That element is going to remain a suggestion, not a solution, no matter how many scenes we get of Fiona Shaw following a dead man into the tundra to discover the bodies of the researchers. It’s a hell of a kicker to the episode, though, and the magical throughline of characters hearing, “She’s awake”—the same thing one of the researchers said before they all disappeared—makes for a fun running tag. I don’t need answers to magic, so while I could see this grating on more pragmatic viewers (especially if it turns into some deus ex machina for the murder mystery), I’m enjoying it.

Overall, this is easily the strongest premiere of True Detective since season one. There’s already some serious plot developments, a well-established framework of characters, and a rich setting. Thematically, I’m also already seeing the hint of existential absurdism: We don’t necessarily know why we make the choices we do, and when people bring up the hole at the center of our self-justifications, most of us would rather keep lying to ourselves, thank you very much. Night Country is doing a solid job of showing us characters that are strangers to themselves, even as they’re known to the very people they’re trying to put up defenses against. Like a one-eyed polar bear suddenly popping up in front of our car, all you can do is watch and wait to see if circumstances go our way. If not, I suspect violence will ensue.

• The victim of the crime Navarro couldn’t solve, Annie K, was stabbed 32 times, had star-shaped wounds, was missing her tongue, and was a midwife and activist who apparently annoyed just about everyone, even her brother. Having just come off reviewing A Murder At The End Of The World, I can already see parallels with this show in terms of how they both want to foreground victims, making them the more meaningful characters as opposed to the killer.

• We don’t learn where the majority of funding for the Tsalal research station comes from, because before Peter can tell Danvers (and us), the wailing of everybody’s least-favorite DUI culprit drowns them out. Something tells me it’s gonna be a big part of this case, though.

• Speaking of which, Foster is so good at delivering lines that might otherwise make you cringe: “I’m not letting the drunk DUI out just ’cuz sometimes she blows you.”

• What a great opener, having all the reindeer screaming and running off the cliff. That’s just eerie as hell.

• So far, this is a surprisingly musical show, from the Billie Eilish credits to the repeated use of The Unthanks’ “Magpie,” to the max-volume application of Jim James’ ‘State Of The Art” during the sequence where Danvers is assembling the photos and discovering one of the researchers was wearing Annie’s jacket.

• Who doesn’t enjoy seeing Navarro repeatedly stick it to a violent misogynist?

• The car accident with Danvers and Leah was unexpectedly tense. Much like the polar bear, I did not see that coming.

• “Shari’s 16, not 15.” “For fuck’s sake.”

• Can’t wait to see how Fiona Shaw plays into all of this. You don’t hire that woman just to walk around after visions of dead guys.

• There were more than a few Easter eggs for fans of the show layered in here, which honestly surprised me, since this really doesn’t need to connect with the other seasons in any way, shape, or form. Yet here we are, with an opening quote from Hildred Castaigne—a.k.a. the fictional narrator found in Robert Chambers’ The King In Yellow, a.k.a the book that more than a few people thought was the key to unlocking the mysteries of season one.

• Welcome, everyone, to the reviews of True Detective: Night Country! Really looking forward to this show, and discussing it with you all. I enjoyed the hell out of this first episode, and I’m already bemoaning the shortened length of the season. (We’ll see if that feeling continues or not.) Let me know your thoughts: did you agree it was a strong debut right out of the gate?

• Also, every time they talked about the tongue, I couldn’t help but think of this:

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