True Detective - The Complete Second Season

Contrary to the impression you may have gotten from the unending think pieces and fan theories that followed each episode, the real pleasure of "True Detective: Season One" was not its mythology. Instead it was the bemused acting done by the people walking through it. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were playing mis-matched movie stars stranded in Noir-ville, and their helplessness within the labyrinth plot proved to be a well of humor. The word on "Season Two-despite a double-sized cast, featuring Colin Ferrell, Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, and Taylor Kitsch-was that the well had run dry. But returning to these episodes months after their first run, we see that "True Detective" retained its fish-out-of-water pleasures during this second go-round. We still enjoy watching these actors flop around.

That's not meant as a stealthy insult, either. Sometimes the flopping is the show's whole point. Once again head writer Nic Pizzolatto has created a cast of characters who exist to get lost within a labyrinth narrative, just so that we can enjoy watching them find themselves. Ray Velcoro (Farrell,) for one, is your typical Colin Farrell character: a boozed-up divorcee who's barely hanging onto the one thing he's got left, a go-nowhere job as a cop in the fictional industrial town of Vinci, CA. He spends some of his time checking in with local mob boss Frank Seymon (Vaughn), who's piecing together the score of his life in the form of a government contract for public transportation work. This being a pulp story, his scheme goes belly-up, which brings more cops into the fold. There's Antigone Bezzerides (McAdams), the razor-edged detective assigned to the case, and Paul Woodrugh (Kitsch), the disgraced Highway Patrolman who gets stuck working with her after he's the first one to arrive at an unlucky crime scene.

So the characters have been swapped. But if you watched "Season One," then you still know what's being served. A shadowy cult, that had been silently directing the actions of our main characters, soon becomes known to all of them. Threats are made. Shots are fired. Assassinations are attempted. Among our characters, bonds are formed, and beds are shared. Decades pass. Timelines jumble. As the laws of fiction dictate, the mysteries are solved, to one degree or another. But if you saw that prior season, there's something else you already know, along with the narrative: this show is a playground for actors who like to swing high or swing low. McAdams plays a character as damaged as Farrell's, and the two clearly delight in their mutually-insulting pitter-patter. The mystery might be simple, smooth, and pre-mixed. But the upside is that the actors get to exhibit rough edges instead.

The Blu-ray release of this HBO program's second season sports extra features that offer more of the series' hallmarks. That means actors, but it also means aerial footage. Each episode opens with some, and in the extras you'll find even more helicopter footage, now scored to music by T. Bone Burnett. As for the actors, they show up elsewhere: all four appear on both audio commentaries (available on a couple of select episodes) and in sit-down interviews (which are all collected together as part of one featurette.) The final extra on the disc is for the action junkies: it's an extended breakdown of the "Vinci Massacre" set piece, which is a shootout that occurs in what's becoming another "True Detective" signature at the exact midpoint of the program.

The exorbinant size of that shootout is almost ostentatious, it's as big as the character's personalities. (In fact, it may be bigger than Kitsch's Woodrugh-he fails to find a center to the character, who's a tragically closeted vereran.) So much of "Detective" is comparably oversized: the mythology is self-important, the references to genre fiction are self-aware, the tone is self-serious. Watching it can be like reading a paperback book that's been bound in leather. But whenever you get to the scenes shared between Farrell and McAdams-when you see their violent sexual chemistry, and hear their rough comic rhythms-you remember there's poetry in this pulp, no matter how it's bound.

"True Detective"
Blu-ray
HBO.com