True Detective season 2 is a grim, ridiculous misfire

The hotly anticipated second season of HBO's anthology crime drama sputters on pretty much every level

True Detective
(Image credit: Lacey Terrell/HBO)

Trey Parker and Matt Stone's raunchy 2004 comedy Team America: World Police was originally planned as a shot-by-shot remake of the ludicrous end-of-the-world blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. Using the exact same script that drove Roland Emmerich's hilariously self-serious movie, Parker and Stone planned to film a relatively straight-faced remake — but with puppets instead of people. The joke, they reasoned, was that The Day After Tomorrow was so staggeringly stupid on its own merits that it was already this close to functioning as a hilarious parody of itself. All it needed was one little push over the edge.

What does any of that have to do with True Detective season 2? Let me put it this way: I would love to see a shot-for-shot puppet remake of the first three episodes.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.