• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

True Detective - Season 2 - We get the Season we deserve - Sundays on HBO

N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
Finalow said:
HYWbigQ.png
Click to expand...

I'm gonna mail this to Pizzaman everyday for a year:

tNEEglX.jpg
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
I went back to the fawning Vanity Fair piece on Nic: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...-true-detective-season-2-better-than-season-1

He described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which “the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.”
Click to expand...

So I guess it's about fatal flaws being their downfalls. Paul's inability to accept his sexuality led to his death.

Genius.

Oh, but then there's other stuff

The next time I met Nic Pizzolatto was in a bungalow in Hollywood. I’d been hired to work in the writers’ room of Magic City, the Starz show about Miami Beach in the late 50s and the scene around a hotel much like the Fontainebleau. The show’s creator and executive producer, Mitch Glazer, was introducing me to the other writers when a young man in jeans and a leather jacket smirked from the couch, saying, “I know you. We had a serious conversation once, in Indiana. We talked about God. Don’t you remember?”
Click to expand...

there was something different about him, something edgy and strange you noticed right away. He registered as bigger than his moderate size, powerful, with a wicked grin. He had an old-fashioned intensity.
Click to expand...

He was 37 but somehow ageless. He could’ve stepped out of a novel by Steinbeck. The writer as crusader, chronicler of love and depravity. His shirt was rumpled, his hair mussed, his manner that of a man who’d just hiked along the railroad tracks or rolled out from under a box. He is fine-featured, with fierce eyes a little too small for his face. It gives him the aura of a bear or some other species of dangerous animal. When I was a boy and dreamed of literature, this is how I imagined a writer—a kind of outlaw, always ready to fight or go on a spree. After a few drinks, you realize the night will culminate with pledges of undying friendship or the two of you on the floor, trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.
Click to expand...

The last time I saw Nic Pizzolatto was just a few months ago, in downtown Los Angeles, on the set of the second season of his brilliant and astonishingly successful HBO crime series, True Detective. I stood outside his trailer like a supplicant, surrounded by handlers, as anxious as a pilgrim. The critical acclaim for his show, its noir-ish mood and cult-like aura, the way its heroes seemed to shamble after some esoteric, Pynchon-esque truth had turned Nic into something more than just another TV writer or show-runner. He’d become an auteur, rich with wisdom, packed with answers. Stepping out of the trailer, he enfolded me in an all-encompassing hug. He was the same but different, having joined the upper echelon of the upper air, knighted by showbiz. What had been rumpled was now smooth; what had been dirty was now clean.
Click to expand...

When I first met Nic, in Indiana, I thought he was in my life. I now realized I’d been in his life.
Click to expand...

“I wouldn’t say True Detective is even a show about ideas as much as it’s a show about intimacies,” he told me. “The forced intimacy of two people sharing a car, the intimacy of connections you don’t get to decide. I write best about people whose souls are on the line. Whatever we mean when we use that word. I certainly don’t use it in a religious sense. But the essence of who you are—that’s on the line. At its simplest level, everything I’ve ever written about, including this and Season One, is about love. We transpose meaning onto a possibly meaningless universe because meaning is personal. And that question of meaning or meaninglessness really becomes a question of: What do you love? Nothing? Then you’ve got a good shot at a meaningless existence. But if you love something—how do you love within the necessities of life and the roles you have to play? I can see that that’s been one of the defining questions of my adult life and work: How do you love adequately?”
Click to expand...

But by tossing out that first season and beginning again, Nic has a chance to finally undo the early error of Fitzgerald and the rest. If he fails and the show tanks, he’ll be just another writer with one great big freakish hit. But if he succeeds, he will have generated a model in which the stars and the stories come and go but the writer remains as guru and king.
Click to expand...

“After I pulled that novel, I had this attitude: I don’t give a fuck if I’m a success or not,” he told me. “What the fuck does that even mean? Who cares? I can live under that goddamned bridge and I’ll be fucking fine. Then my wife got pregnant. When she was in her third trimester, I wrote the first draft of Galveston in four weeks. I felt the responsibility and stakes in the world I had not felt previously, [when] I didn’t owe anybody anything and who gives a shit? But the idea that I was going to bring somebody into this world, who didn’t ask to be in this world. I was at her delivery and she was holding my pinkie when she was being washed up. I remember thinking, You poor kid, of all the dad dice you could have rolled, you got me.”
Click to expand...

comment_6FsaeuHdRw75fl3IZpUujLVE5NlHeuAY.gif


Holy Christ, this piece goes on forever. The person writing this should have just ditched the piece and blown Nic.
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
Holloway (to Woodrugh): If you had just been honest about who you are, nobody'd be able to run you.

No, fuck you, Nic. You don't get to point out an obvious truth and pass it off as something novel and revelatory.
NotTheGuyYouKill said:
Holy Christ, this piece goes on forever. The person writing this should have just ditched the piece and blown Nic.
Click to expand...
The person who wrote that probably wants to get rid of all signs that it ever existed. The person who wrote that probably wants to blow his or her brains out now.
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
Nic was younger than the other Magic City writers, and clearly on the rise. Opinionated but open, a first-class listener. Funny. Occasionally sweet. He made you feel O.K. even when your idea sucked. He seemed perfect for TV, as his thought process unfolded like a show—action and color, dark turns and surprising reveals. His eyes turned hot and visionary as he spoke. He sat back and sneered. His phone flashed. His phone flashed all the time. Big things were happening for him elsewhere. Even so, Nic kept his focus, determined to crack each character. O.K., O.K., but what’s really driving this guy? If you understand what he wants, you’ll understand what he does. I’ve never met a less sentimental person than Nic. His worldview is brutal. The metaphysical is dismissed with a wave of the hand. People are driven by hunger and need. There’s only right here, right now. It’s unclear if this is how Nic experiences life or if it’s just how he writes television, or if there’s a difference.
Click to expand...

tumblr_n2uiahNnpm1tvw5iuo4_250.gif


Nic was at first startlingly open about his influences, extolling writers and books that stood behind Cohle’s soliloquies. Laird Barron, John Langan, Simon Strantzas, Emil Cioran. He urged fans to read Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow and Karl Edward Wagner’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming.” He seemed to play with the legend of Carcosa, a mythical city first chronicled by Ambrose Bierce. He cited the horror writer Thomas Ligotti, especially the book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, all of which gave the show pedigree, a mystical sheen. He’s since become touchy on the subject, Ligotti fanatics having accused him of too much borrowing. It’s a bullshit charge. You can’t steal a cast of mind. But when I asked Nic about influences, he bristled. “I tend to be influenced by places as much as anything,” he said. “You look around and notice details and it starts to form a world and then you find characters to inhabit this world.”
Click to expand...

Years ago, I met a record executive who’d auditioned and rejected MC Hammer. The rapper accosted the executive at a banquet as his song “Can’t Touch This” was topping the charts.

“You fucked up, man, turned me down, and now I got the biggest hit in the world.”

“That’s not a hit,” the executive said. “It’s a freak.”

“What’s a freak?”

“A hit is a hit. You follow it with other hits. But no one knows what to do after a freak.”

The first season of True Detective was a freak. It ushered Nic, without prelude, to the first rank. Everything depends on what he does next, the second season, terrible or sublime. He actually referred to it as his “second album.”

Nic’s temperament, which is old-school fiery artist, suits the task. He’s not a trimmer, nor a hedger of bets. He’s a big personality, the crazy fuck who, having won a pile of chips—and it’s two in the morning and the casino is filled with sharks—pushes it all back to the center of the table.

“What even makes it the same show?,” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got new actors, new characters, new plotlines … ”

He thought a moment, head in hand, fingers drumming on his temple. “Sensibility,” Nic said. “Me. Crime, detectives, intimacies, and ideas … but it’s all just me. That’s what makes it the same show.”
Click to expand...
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
All of your excerpts could have been compiled neatly into one post.

Hell, the parts relevant to the first season aren't even bad for Nic or the writer.
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
No, they're not, but I just love his 'in love' writing style.

Squalor said:
Holloway (to Woodrugh): If you had just been honest about who you are, nobody'd be able to run you.

No, fuck you, Nic. You don't get to point out an obvious truth and pass it off as something novel and revelatory.

The person who wrote that probably wants to get rid of all signs that it ever existed. The person who wrote that probably wants to blow his or her brains out now.
Click to expand...

Oh Rich Cohen. I hope to see a follow up to that piece.

cohen_rich.jpg
Click to expand...

I will give Nic credit for this one though:

Here is Nic Pizzolatto, the movie-star whisperer. He’ll do for Vince Vaughn what he did for Matthew McConaughey: bring out what’s been obscured by the kind of movies he’s made. “I felt like I could do a lot with the guy,” Nic told me. “I could show people stuff from Vince Vaughn they hadn’t seen before—the Vince Vaughn they always wanted, without knowing it.”
Click to expand...

Vaughn's been damn good this season... when the lines he was spouting weren't pseudo-philosophical stuff

This is why I imagine Nic would fight HBO if they tried to make him use a writer's room:

Other than sharing credit with novelist Scott Lasser on two episodes, Nic wrote the second season by himself in Ojai, California, 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, where he moved not long ago. Most show creators assemble a writers’ room for that all-important second season. Nic does just about all the writing himself—he wrote the whole first season. (“Nobody does that,” Vaughn told me, laughing. “That’s insane.”) “I work more efficiently on my own,” Nic explained. “I suppose it’s that ingrained authorial sensibility: if I’m making a movie or a show or whatever, I’m expressing something on a personal level or else it doesn’t mean anything to me. If I’m doing that, it works better without a committee.

“I had a big whiteboard which I covered in Post-It notes,” he went on. “Every character was a different-colored note. I did horizontal bars for eight episodes. Some days, I set myself a certain number of pages or a specific scene. If I finished early, great. If I didn’t finish on time, I had to stick around. I’ve learned to take care of myself. I get lunch, put on Seinfeld, and do 45 minutes of yoga. I become very raw emotionally [when I’m writing]—a good steak could bring me to tears. I’m very porous. My membrane isn’t solid. And then I gradually come out of that. And it’s time to join the circus.”
Click to expand...

Meanwhile, he’s here, entirely present in this interregnum between seasons, the show-running auteur a moment before the next moment. You can taste the danger. A hint of mercury in the water. Nic will have to pay for the sin of his success, as everyone pays for everything. He raised the bar too high that first season. People want answers from a show like that. They want to be told what to think and how to live. Of course, a show can’t give those kinds of answers, because even a great show is made not by God but by a TV writer with black pens, whiteboards, take-out menus, and research. Instead of answers, you get reversals, reveals, and special effects. That is, more TV. You feel empty. With time, this emptiness turns to frustration. The better the show, the greater that frustration. In the end, nothing satisfies. There should be a term for that special kind of melancholy that follows the finale of your favorite show.
Click to expand...
 
D

DoktorEvil

Banned
“I had a big whiteboard which I covered in Post-It notes,” he went on. “Every character was a different-colored note. I did horizontal bars for eight episodes. Some days, I set myself a certain number of pages or a specific scene. If I finished early, great. If I didn’t finish on time, I had to stick around. I’ve learned to take care of myself. I get lunch, put on Seinfeld, and do 45 minutes of yoga. I become very raw emotionally [when I’m writing]—a good steak could bring me to tears. I’m very porous. My membrane isn’t solid. And then I gradually come out of that. And it’s time to join the circus.”
Click to expand...

fM4LCvQ.gif


Exactly whom did he fuck to get into Hollywood? I can't believe this man is the same man responsible for the twist in S1.
 
R

rhino4evr

Member
My favorite lines from the show recently....

"This contract is full of signatures!" - what else would be on a contract besides words?
"Order Room Service.....and don't answer the door or pick up the phone for anyone but me"...um.
"I think I'm walking into something"...um turn around then?
 
L

lamaroo

Unconfirmed Member
rhino4evr said:
My favorite lines from the show recently....

"This contract is full of signatures!" - what else would be on a contract besides words?
"Order Room Service.....and don't answer the door or pick up the phone for anyone but me"...um.
"I think I'm walking into something"...um turn around then?
Click to expand...

I noticed that second one when he said it lol

That third one though, he said that before he saw his buddy/lover. I guess he trusted him enough to follow him in.
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
Surprisingly, Frank had most of the best lines from "Black Maps and Motel Rooms."

"Truth is your only play right now because you fucked up letting yourself be alone in this room with me."

"Now you just shit my carpet."

"Sober up. You might realize you're getting fucked."
lamaroo said:
I noticed that second one when he said it lol

That third one though, he said that before he saw his buddy/lover. I guess he trusted him enough to follow him in.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that room service line was confusing as hell.

No, Paul isn't that dumb. He knew he was fucked. He knew they were blackmailing him and that they'd kill him if he didn't go along.

They just didn't count on God Mode Woodrugh. And he didn't count on Burris ex machi-door.
 
A

Anton Sugar

Member
You guys, it's pretty clear he was actually trying to get his mom and wife-to-be killed by intentionally giving them very unclear and nonsensical instructions.
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
Anton Sugar said:
You guys, it's pretty clear he was actually trying to get his mom and wife-to-be killed by intentionally giving them very unclear and nonsensical instructions.
Click to expand...
"Bitch stole the $25,000 I stupidly left in the top of her closet for four years."

Characterization is so poorly managed this season.
 
C

CopperPuppy

Member
Meanwhile, he’s here, entirely present in this interregnum between seasons, the show-running auteur a moment before the next moment. You can taste the danger. A hint of mercury in the water. Nic will have to pay for the sin of his success, as everyone pays for everything. He raised the bar too high that first season. People want answers from a show like that. They want to be told what to think and how to live. Of course, a show can’t give those kinds of answers, because even a great show is made not by God but by a TV writer with black pens, whiteboards, take-out menus, and research. Instead of answers, you get reversals, reveals, and special effects. That is, more TV. You feel empty. With time, this emptiness turns to frustration. The better the show, the greater that frustration. In the end, nothing satisfies. There should be a term for that special kind of melancholy that follows the finale of your favorite show.
Click to expand...

What the fuck am I reading.
 
I

iddqd

Member
Kadayi

Kadayi

Banned
NotTheGuyYouKill said:
This is why I imagine Nic would fight HBO if they tried to make him use a writer's room:
Click to expand...

Regardless of 'his' method, the writing/pacing has come on for a considerable amount of criticism this season and I find it hard to envisage that HBO will green light a third season with Pizzolatto alone running the show. More writers means more diversity of voice to the characters, and that's something that's missing. With season 1 it was a smaller cast and more focused on Rust and Cohle, but with season 2 the expanse requires a bit more differential.

Personally I'm enjoying the show, even if it has issues. I think overall the performances have been good, it's more some of the dialogue and pacing that's been the problem. More writers on staff would hopefully resolve that.
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
iddqd said:
This reminds me of the guy behind the FARGO tv show, Noah Hawley.

He also wrote the big stuff alone but then used a couple of writers to break stories and get a bit of help.
He still was the big creative force but not THAT far up his butt like the Pizzaman.
And even FARGO I thought could have used some more editing and maybe 2 episodes less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Hawley

A good interview about the process here:
http://nerdist.com/nerdist-writers-panel-145-noah-hawley-and-fargo/
Click to expand...

Hawley apparently doesn't believe in writer's rooms either

ivysaur12 said:
Like that time that Noah Hawley said that writers' rooms are where creativity goes to die.

oh wait you had a writers' room breaking all of your episodes of Fargo and then took credit on every episode and pretending like none of them existed go fuck yourself.
Click to expand...

Sober said:
Wasn't TD also Nic's first foray into TV?

fake edit: guess not

I'm sure HBO will eventually notice this because they already greenlit it.


Holy shit, for real? wtf


edit: http://variety.com/2014/biz/news/wr...-does-tv-creativity-flourish-best-1201219160/

huh

edit again: http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/far...that-made-the-fx-miniseries-shine-1201265082/

jesus
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
Denton

Denton

Member
So are people finally realizing what a shitty writer Pizzolato is ? About time.
Can't wait for Fargo to come back.
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
I guess Birdman could have killed Caspere and dumped him outside of Vinci jurisdiction on purpose in order to force an investigation to happen that caused all the conspiracies to come to light

Stole that one from Reddit.
 
A

Ashok

Banned
Denton said:
So are people finally realizing what a shitty writer Pizzolato is ? About time.
Can't wait for Fargo to come back.
Click to expand...
+1000. I think I'm done with Pizzaman for good, the Emperor has no clothes. Luckily Fargo exists and actually has competent writers.
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
The best show at this time is Rectify. I expect the second season of Transparent to put up a hell of a fight, though. Fargo season two will probably take third place.
TRios Zen said:
Man I'd love a GAF account (True Dick?) that ONLY posted quotes from season 2 in threads.

That'd be great.
Click to expand...
You call it "True Defective."
 
D

dead souls

Member
iddqd said:
This reminds me of the guy behind the FARGO tv show, Noah Hawley.
Click to expand...

Noah Hawley has to be the happiest man in showbiz right now. He's probably seeing the reaction to this season thinking "Damn, even if people don't like my season 2 they won't hate it this bad."

There's no way he can Pizzolatto his second season.
 
S

Squalor

Junior Member
Finalow said:
please kill Colin Hanks in Fargo season 2.
Click to expand...
You do realize Fargo is going the same anthology route as True Detective, right?

He's not in this season. Hell, his character probably wasn't even born yet when this season-two story was taking place in the 1970s.
 
A

Anton Sugar

Member
Oh, I didn't realize he was that involved in Rectify--IMDb only lists him as director of one episode. I love his acting.

Been meaning to check out Rectify...
 
F

Finalow

Member
Squalor said:
You do realize Fargo is going the same anthology route as True Detective, right?

He's not in this season. Hell, his character probably wasn't even born yet when this season-two story was taking place in the 1970s.
Click to expand...
I didn't know, I do know that now though.

that's a good thing right.
 
N

NotTheGuyYouKill

Member
What if the real story here is Nic. The whole Oedipus/hero with a tragic flaw here is him.

This is a story about himself. All the characters are aspects of himself on the page and screen
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club | Review Thread
Analysis Review
29
1K
Thick Thighs Save Lives replied
‘The Last Of Us’: Isabela Merced Cast As Dina In Season 2 Of HBO Series
2 3
109
13K
DrFigs replied
True Detective Season 4 to star Jodie Foster
3 4 5 6 7
310
24K
Billbofet replied
‘The Last of Us’ Season 1 Finale Scores 8.2 Million Viewers, Reaching Series High
News 2 3
141
8K
Zephyrus0 replied
Coming to Game Pass: Neon White, Flock, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, and More
39
2K
Punished Miku replied
Top Bottom