Fran Magazine: Issue #96

Fran is ten years late to True Detective Season One

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Maestro moment

Bradley Cooper held a night at David Geffen Hall on Valentine’s Day last week. I was not in attendance, but friend of the magazine Jordan Hoffman was. My absence was not for lack of trying; I sent a lot of emails, trust me. Maestro also appears in the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue. At the time of writing (9am), it seems like he’s not in any of the cheeky video content. Maybe more will drop soon. Maestro also met Messi. Also he said this:

As the Oscar season starts to wind down, it behooves me to say that granting one (1) interview to Fran Magazine would have done a lot for the Maestro campaign. I really believe this.

Fran Magazine’s 100th issue

This happens in one month?? What should we (I) do? Something worth celebrating here. Maybe one of you wants to buy me healthcare…

As good as a book

When the first episode of Season One of True Detective aired on HBO, I was living with my parents. I had graduated from college not long prior, and I spent the summer and autumn months living at home and working a decent-paying food service job and a no-paying internship that wanted me there every weekday from nine to five for, as I said, no money. We “compromised” at three days a week, and when I wasn’t offered a job at the end of the internship, they said it wasn’t clear whether I had “wanted it” badly enough.

That January, however, I’d finally signed a lease in the city, paying $650 each month for a narrow three-bedroom Edgewater apartment two blocks away from my favorite Vietnamese restaurant with two roommates. One of the roommates had HBO Go and they bought a big smart TV¹ that we could use to watch HBO Go. I can’t remember what I was watching on TV at the time besides Game of Thrones which always struck me as a distinctly “college” show — which is to say, either all of the good episodes came out when I was in college, or that I only thought the show was good when I was a college student.² I was aware of True Detective and its quiet phenomenon. I was reading a lot of AV Club at the time, and I seemed to recall they also loved True Detective. I was also doing a lot of comedy with men and the men with whom I was doing comedy loved True Detective.

My brain at this time was made of water and ice cream, and I spent a lot of my extracurricular time feeling very jealous. One of my peers in comedy who was already racking up Shouts & Murmurs credits and who was not working an internship for no money³ sent me a frantic text recommendation for True Detective. “You have to watch it,” he wrote me, “it’s basically literature, like better than reading a book.” I found this to be a pointed comment, though I don’t think that it was, because I was someone who read books and hoped to, at some point, write them as well. I took the recommendation because it wasn’t like I didn’t have hours in the day to kill and watch TV. I think I got about fifteen minutes into the first episode of the first season, fell asleep, and didn’t go back.⁴

For the next decade, I was quick to argue that True Detective was boring (as at least evidenced by my falling asleep) and sexist (as evidenced by what felt like screenshots of Alexandra Daddario making their way across my various timelines). Nic Pizzolatto seemed annoying; so did Cary Fukunaga (though I liked his adaptation of Jane Eyre). I’m not sure what it was about season one that bothered me more than the presence of the others, maybe just the fawning and theorizing. I had done shows like that before, Lost, namely, where the tedious dot-connecting felt like it amounted to very little. Why was I going to do unpaid labor for a TV show? Please.

Out of disdain and frustration for the fourth season of True Detective, which is not so much the fourth season of anything, even an anthology show, we started the first season of True Detective, a show Phil has seen a few times and I’d never seen past the first ten minutes. We went through it all in about two weeks, slow to start, then rushing through the back half of the season, forgoing our movie-watching plans on Valentine’s Day to watch the final two episodes. I’m not really interested in comparing it directly to the fourth season, only that annoyance in one thing led to discovery in another. It seems like their preoccupations are otherwise totally different. All of that is to say that while I still maintain the show errs on the side of snoozy⁵, it’s been one of the most rewarding television-watching experiences I’ve had in a long time, enriching and baffling and often frightening. I was so happy not to read a single theory ever.

Coming late to anything brings its own level of fun. On one hand, you don’t have to engage in any active and/or stupid discourse about the object. On the other hand, if you text your friends to ask, “Have you seen Season One of True Detective?” they’ll all be like, “Uh, yeah, when it aired.”⁶ I felt free to make my own judgments, to engage with it in relative isolation. I spent a lot of time wondering about its gender politics and its views on the police, mainly because my thinking it was very obviously sexist art felt like it was at the forefront of my memory, and also because I often think back on one of the many conversations in 2020 being the oversaturated of police media.⁷

I returned, for whatever reason, to Emily Nussbaum’s review in The New Yorker at the time of airing, which I remembered being a pan that was ape-able enough to parrot as an excuse not to engage with the show. I’ll summarize but the gist was that the women were paper-thin and the sex scenes borderline pornographic. She thinks Rust is a “macho fantasy.” It was my general read on the show that, first and foremost, Michelle Monaghan is giving an incredible performance as Marty’s beleaguered wife Maggie. Monaghan is an underrated performer, often slotted into “wife” or “girlfriend” roles. I recall especially loving her in Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a movie that undoubtedly has bad gender politics but gives her plenty to have fun with. Maggie’s pain in True Detective felt legitimate and anguished — it is never going well for her in that show, and her slow and then fast disavowal of her husband is like watching the world around her crumble. I have to imagine that someone who marries a cop finally actually realizing they married a cop is like the worst kind of cold water plunge.

Mostly, it seems like Nussbaum is irritated that True Detective isn’t Broadchurch. I think most crucially, she wrote:

On “True Detective,” however, we’re not watching the distorted testimony of an addict, punctured by flashes of accidental self-revelation. The scenes we see are supposed to be what really happened. And when a mystery show is about disposable female bodies, and the women in it are eye candy, it’s a drag. Whatever the length of the show’s much admired tracking shot (six minutes, uncut!), it feels less hardboiled than softheaded. Which might be O.K. if “True Detective” were dumb fun, but, good God, it’s not: it’s got so much gravitas it could run for President.

I actually think — and this is where it helped to have seen Season Two of the show — it is all pretty silly. It is undoubtedly scary at times, and frequently brilliantly acted, but it is also a silly show. Rust Cohle is silly. He is cool, sure, but he is a silly guy, spacey and strange and tortured in a borderline farcical sort of way. There is a reason an image like this has really endured.

Like, I’m laughing! Maybe it helps that at this point I’ve seen enough HBO Sunday night crime shows — Mare of Easttown, Sharp Objects, whatever — to know that the cop characters are weird, silly losers. I do not find them admirable or a kind of fantasy, even in True Detective where Matthew McConaughey looks insane and skinny. Mare is definitely not cool, or really all that enviable. Nor is Chris Messina in Sharp Objects — one of the finer idiot roles in a long time. It feels crucial in the general grasping of True Detective’s first season’s “meaning” that in order for these two guys to do what they feel they have to do, neither of them are police anymore.⁸ I don’t think the inherent silliness takes away from the gravity of the show, nor does it make the drama any less compelling. There is a rich irony to the season, one that keeps it from descending into a total nightmare⁹ (though it does kind of do that in its own way too).

My parents also started watching the first season of True Detective simultaneous to their watching of the fourth season. They finished probably a week before I did. I asked my mom what she made of the ending — about which I knew nothing, other than they probably both lived given Nic Pizzolatto was posting them in Instagram — and she said, “I’m disappointed there aren’t more episodes.” I felt a similar sort of melancholy when I finally finished watching last week. We discussed for a while, staying up too late on a school night, and then I was happy to put the show to bed. I thought about what my peer said¹⁰ a while back, whether it was better than reading a book. I’ll admit my book-reading slowed significantly when I watched, but was it better? To me watching this show, some ten years after its release, had the same kind of private joy of book-reading, where whatever supplementary material I wanted (or not) was at my disposal, at my own pace. My impressions were my own; I felt silly describing how watching it felt to anyone who wasn’t me. I don’t know if it was better, but I realized I knew what was meant by the comment, the engrossing, personal experience it cultivated as I watched. I felt no call to action, no urge to work at understanding it. The show was an open text, patient and forgiving, through which I could make up for lost time.

1. I was generously gifted that TV from my roommate when they moved to LA a few years later. I still have it — there’s never a good reason to get rid of a working TV if you watch as many movies as I do.

2. I briefly got “in trouble” for mumbling derisively through later seasons of Game of Thrones when watching with a group in grad school.

3. I recall once asking him if he was paying his own rent and he said, “That’s not something I have to worry about.”

4. Weirdly enough, prior to this past winter, the only True Detective season I’d seen all of was the second, which I’m now eager to revisit…

5. That — in tandem with my own general sleep deprivation — meant that I literally slept through this somewhat crucial scene the first time around.

6. Flashbacks of watching The Godfather Part II in 2018 and texting my friend, “It’s crazy what happens with Fredo,” and she was like, “??? yes.”

7. I think a lot of that dialogue was about, like, the Dick Wolf extended universe. But still.

8. Whereas what I got out of what I saw of Not True Detective: Season Four is that there is such thing as feminist police (?).

9. Idk about you but if I see Ann Dowd on an HBO show I’m basically already laughing…

10. I would get back in touch with him but he’s since become an Elon reply guy, so.