In retrospect, the first season of True Detective, the HBO anthology crime series certainly had flaws. It was rescued by incredible writing, the chemistry between Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson and the backdrop of the South, namely Louisiana, with the two actors playing cops chasing grisly serial murderers.
Season 2, starring a completely different set of actors, was a nightmare of a series that you couldn’t even get through as it hit the final episode. However, hope was installed when Mahershala Ali, hot off his Academy Award win for his role in Moonlight, was cast in the third season. But now that the trailer is here, one can say he’s haunted in it but beyond that, there’s not much that can be said.
Scheduled to appear on January 2019, the series sees Ali cast as an Arkansas state police detective, Wayne Hays, investigating gruesome murders. A time skip element that was present in the first season is present here too.
In the meantime, a voiceover says: “My whole brain’s a bunch of missing pieces. My job – there’s no certainty. This peace is more haunting than anything. I want to know the whole story.”
The crimes he’s investigating have a past and present narrative, another Season 1 element that might work in True Detective 3’s favour.
The one good news is that creator Nic Pizzolatto has returned and has written the third season; he’s also directing a couple of episodes. The same melancholic mood he created in the first season seems alive here as well, which could go either way, depending on the series as a whole.
True Detective 3 also stars John Charles Dickson, Stephen Dorff, Carmen Ejogo, Ray Fisher and Sarah Gadon.