Delight or Disappointment?

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT, HBO will premiere the third season of its Nic Pizzolatto-created anthology crime series, True Detective, and reviews have been rather mixed. Vox, for instance, has this to say:

In many ways, season three feels like season one with the latter’s more idiosyncratic edges sanded off. There are hints of some terrible horror lurking in the heart of Southern rural America (in this case via the form of strange dolls that keep turning up at the scenes of children’s murders and disappearances). There's a fascination with how systemic corruption approaches the level of Lovecraftian horror. There are long, philosophical ramblings in cop cars. …

But season three is bolstered by centralizing just one character instead of a duo. As Wayne Hays, Mahershala Ali commands the story’s center—he’s the one character who is consistently presented across all three timelines—and creates a mesmerizing portrait of a man cracking apart under his glimpses at true inhumanity.

Meanwhile, the entertainment Web site Collider opines:

Each episode ends with a very fine cliffhanger, but the overall pace is slow and rich, building an interesting, layered, and very personal story. The turning points of the case aren’t dragged out—there’s no time, so the narrative dolls things out at a reasonable pace—and T Bone Burnett’s soundtrack is again a perfect, twangy accompaniment that sets a gloomy, uneasy mood. It may not be as arresting or iconic as the first season, but time is a flat circle. True Detective has come back around with a true return to form.

(Collider has also posted a good interview with series creator Nic Pizzolatto and star Mahershala Ali, which you can enjoy here.)

Finally, Salon’s Melanie McFarland serves up some contrary views:

Laced throughout these new “True Detective” episodes are replays of first season details, down to the creepy sculptures left by crime scenes; this time it’s corn husk dolls instead of sticks held together with mud and hair and who knows what else.

The plot’s framework may be a retread, but those who kept the faith through the three-and-a-half-year gap between the disastrous season 2 and this new story may be heartened by its intentional recall to the [Matthew] McConaughey-[Woody] Harrelson chapter. If this is Pizzolatto asking for a do-over, Ali’s smolder lends the writer enough currency to buy at least a few hours of patience.

But from there it’s hard to definitively characterize this season as more of a success than the season it resembles most.

Mind you, one lesson Pizzolatto seems to have learned (somewhat) is that he’s given the piece at least one woman who is a fully realized human being and not simply a cipher waiting to be completed or broken by a male hero, or a female character who might as well be a guy, as Rachel McAdams played her role in season 2.

Ali and [Carmen] Ejogo [who plays his school teacher wife] have stronger chemistry here than Ali and [Stephen] Dorff [who appears as his partner, Roland West], and that seems to be a purposeful choice and, given Dorff’s more limited dramatic range, the right one.

But this is still Nic Pizzolatto after all, which means the other significant female role, that of Mamie Gummer’s Lucy Purcell, is a screaming harpy who, in one scene, declares that she knows she has the “soul of a whore.” And maybe that wouldn’t be so vexing from another auteur creator. A better one wouldn’t make Ali sell a recollection’s permanence by explaining he remembers the date the kids went missing because it happened on the same day Steve McQueen died. I’m not saying that note is implausible, but that regardless of how smoothly Ali delivers that line it might as well be spilling out of Pizzolatto’s mouth; in the context of the series, it's a too-obvious flourish of ersatz cool.

At the very least Ali’s muscular performance, and that of Scoot McNairy as the bereaved father of the missing kids, earn the show a little more rope at the end of each episode.

Nevertheless it’s tough to shake the sense that the third outing for “True Detective” could leave us with as much of a contentment gap as the close of the Rusty and Marty chronicles. Circling back is a fine plan, especially given the amount of time that has gone by. But if the action spins off into nothing again at the end of this Lazarus act, and after so much hype, I suspect fewer people will be jonesing to re-open the case again.

Let us know what you think of the new True Detective after you’ve had a chance to screen and consider Episode 1.

READ MORE: “True Detective: The Crucial Literary Allusions You Might Have Missed in the Premiere,” by Joanna Robinson (Vanity Fair); “Review: True Detective (S3 E1&2),” by Andy D. (The Killing Times).