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| Season Three Poster feat Mahershala Ali |
The cast for the third season are great with the the Oscar winner Marshalia Ali in the lead as Wayne Hays a Arkansas homicide detective and Vietnam War veteran who we follow thorough three different time periods. In 1980 Hays is early in his career as he and his partner Roland West played by Stephen Dorff respond one night to the disappearance of two children Will and Lucy in a small town in Arkansas. The two kids belong to the Purcell family which is made up of Tom Purcell played by Scoot McNairy and Lucy Purcell played by Mamie Gummer who upon the audience first meeting them show signs that their marriage is falling apart and may have never been stable. Lucy is a hard partyer who stays out most nights with her friends and other men and Tom unable to face the reality of their marriage still loves her and wants to make it work. Hays and West after searching the neighbor hood the night of the disappearance and creating search parties to look for them in the day, eventually go to the children school to try and learn more about them. This is where we meet Amelia Reardon Will's teacher played by Carmen Egjago who after some conversation with the detectives, Hays wants to try and have a relationship with her. Later in 1990 we see that Hays and Reardon are married with children, but Hays is no longer in a field position and is now riding a desk. Until he is questioned with something relation to the Purcell case and the he and West caught the wrong guy and maybe the children are still out there. The show also takes place in 2015 with a much older Hays being interviewed about the case and the book that his wife eventually wrote on the subject by a true crime television show, but it is clear that Hays is suffering from dementia and blackouts were he loses track of time.
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| Show Creator Nic Pizzolato |
This story on it's own is certainly ambitious and complicated, but that is what the series creator, writer, and director Nic Pizzolato has tried to do ever since the first and second season. He doesn't make what I would call the most easily digestible story even though it is on a medium like TV that goes out to masses of people. The investigation that is presented in any of the different stories that make up True Detective are more about the characters, what drives them to act and feel how they do. Just as important to the characters is the environment that they come from and how it played its role in shaping them. This time it is Arkansas and it feels like Arkansas in that everything is so isolated, every town while only being made up of 200 people is spread out from one another. That kind of isolation and distance can be in its way seen in the characters themselves, in their pauses between words and long silences. The importance of the "Landscape" is something Pizzolato has talked about before in reference to his characters in season one in that they "inhabit a poisoned dystopia" and that "apocalypse has already come and gone, and no one's quite woken up to that fact". The environment and the characters work together to create a feeling that everything is natural and fits within this world. The reality that the show creates makes the more philosophical and metaphysical musings that some characters in their own way have not feel jarring and forced. This combination of environment, believable characters, and much larger subjects is what I think make True Detective much more interesting than other show about detectives solving cases.
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