Stream It Or Skip It: ‘True Detective’ Season 3 on HBO, Where Mahershala Ali Investigates Missing Children

You remember Season 2 of True Detective, don’t you? You know, Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, and looping storylines that didn’t make sense? No? Well, fans of the classic McConaughey/Harrelson first season would like to forget about that confusing second season. HBO gave Nic Pizzolatto another chance to mount a new season of his anthology a couple of years later, and he’s decided to not only stick with the Season 1 formula but bring in Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, as well. Does it work?

TRUE DETECTIVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We pan over a shot of the woods surrounding a small town in the Ozarks, then a closeup of two kids riding their bikes.

The Gist: This season of True Detective takes place during three timelines, but the meat of it is in November, 1980 in Arkansas. Two kids, Will and Julie Purcell (Phoenix Elkin, Lena McCarthy) go missing after they were supposed to return from a friend’s house. Two state police detectives, Roland West (Stephen Dorff) and Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali), who have been spending a quiet night drinking and shooting rats in a junkyard, get called in on the case when the kids’ father, Tom Purcell (Scoot McNairy) calls them in. At first, Hays thinks that the kids were abducted by their absent mother, but then a drunk Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer) comes home and scuttles that theory, but she has something else to hide.

Their investigation takes them to the kids’ school, where the decidedly single Hays meets the boy’s English teacher, Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo), whom he definitely notices beyond just business.

Another part of the story takes place in 1990, where Hays is being deposed by lawyers after a lawsuit is filed by the family of the person who was convicted of the crime; their belief is that the police got the wrong guy. During that interview, it’s revealed that Hays, a Vietnam vet, has some short-term memory problems.

Those problems are even more intense as we flash forward to 2015, where the retired Hays now has to dictate things for him to remember later into a digital recorder. A docuseries is being made about the case, and he’s being asked to relive the case again, 35 years after it began. It dredges up a lot of emotions, not the least of which is the fact that his wife Amelia, who wrote a book about the case, recently passed away.

Our Take: Three and a half years after True Detective‘s disastrous second season, creator Nic Pizzolatto — who this year has added to his duties by directing some of the episodes — has gone back to what made the first season of the show such a success. A big mystery with ritualistic elements, shifting timelines, a pair of cops who like to talk about philosophies of life probably more than investigating crimes.

As we were watching the season premiere, we were struck with how it feels you could lift out Ali and Dorff and drop in Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson (both executive producers of this season) and not miss a beat. While Ali’s character of Wayne Hays isn’t as outwardly weird as McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, there are things roiling underneath that are odd, like when he tells West about marriage, “I’m not a big enough asshole to put a woman and children through that.” Also, the skills he learned doing LERP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) work in ‘Nam makes him apt to go his own way when looking or clues.

Following the format of the first season also means that the first episode moves a bit slowly, like the first episode did five years ago. More talking than anything else, and lots of long pauses, especially as Hays and Amelia take long looks at each other as he tries to give her an update on the case.

All that being said, the performances will keep us watching. Ali didn’t win an Oscar by accident, and he plays Hays as businesslike and understated, but certainly one who has to come to grips with his slipping memory, especially in the 2015 timeline. And we want to see a lot more of Ejogo as the eloquent Amelia, who seems to fundamentally change Hays for the better.

Sex and Skin: All business here.

Parting Shot: Hays finds out a shocking fact from the lawyers deposing him in 1990 that throws everything he knows about the case in doubt.

Sleeper Star: Gummer puts in her usual solid performance as the kids’ mother Lucy. But we’re also intrigued by the presence of Cougr Town’s Josh Hopkins as one of the lawyers deposing Hays in 1990.

Most Pilot-y Line: In the junkyard, West goes to shoot a fox and Hays stops him in an overly-dramatic segment. There’s going to be some symbolism there, we just feel it, but for now it felt out of place.

Our Call: STREAM IT, mostly for the performances of Ali and Ejogo. Maybe Pizzolatto will take Season 3 of True Detective in another direction later in the season, but it feels he’s sticking to the formula he established in Season 1.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream True Detective Season 3 on HBO Now