True Detective Season 2 Is No Longer About Weird Occult Shit

What narratively disappointing bullshit is this: True Detective’s second season will apparently no longer be about “the secret occult history” of transportation. Pfffft. That sound is my dreams deflating.

Show creator Nic Pizzolato said last March, cryptically —is anything about this damn show not cryptic— that the second season would focus on “hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system.” That set off an incredibly entertaining guessing game about just what in hell that could possibly mean, but now Pizzolato appears to have changed his mind. In a Q&A with posted on Medium, he said that’s no longer the angle, having been discarded in favor of “closer character work and a more grounded crime story.”

“Grounded” is probably a relative term for the man who took us on a hallucinogen-fueled, dead-lady-strewn tour of rural Louisiana, but OK, Nic. We’ll go there.

For now, we do know definitely, for certain, that the second season is set in Los Angeles County and stars Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams. The only thing it shares with last season, thematically, is that it looks like a moody drag.

Here’s the first trailer, featuring that craggy duo and Farrell’s structural monstrosity of a mustache: