This review contains mild spoilers for True Detective: Night Country.
The theme song of True Detective: Night Country — the fourth installment in HBO’s once-hit series — is Billie Eilish’s “bury a friend.” Writer/director Issa López uses the song for its lyrical and musical resonance — a resonance already played out by people on TikTok four years ago.
There is more to storytelling than originality. Many genres return to the same well of tropes and conventions remixing them with new settings, new characters, and new forms. To be cliché is not to be bad, but clichés sure can make a bad thing worse. Especially when working within a genre seeped in propaganda, especially when those clichés reinforce the worst narratives in our world.
True Detective: Night Country is a cop show. If you thought a post-June 2020 True Detective would have anything to say about policing, you’ve mistaken the false promises of that summer as genuine. Once again, surface level identity politics won over meaningful structural change. More and more the cops on-screen abusing their power get to be women, queer people, and people of color. This is supposed to be a win.
But this Jodie Foster vehicle is not The Silence of the Lambs. It is not an expertly crafted piece of media soured by its messaging of police propaganda. As a work of art, it’s dull. This is often the case. Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic is the exception not the rule — most media that traffics in these same narratives finds little purpose other than this perpetuation. There is little in True Detective: Night Country that’s compelling — not the narrative, not the characters, not the form. It looks expensive and has some strong performances, but that is not enough to prop up all the mediocrity.
True Detective: Night Country is about a police chief named Liz Danvers (Foster) who has been transferred to the remote Alaskan town of Ennis. Her hobbies include drinking, empty sex with men (yes, Foster is straight in this), being racist toward Leah, her Indigenous queer step daughter, being racist toward other Indigenous people in the community, and being the sort of Columbo super detective we’ve grown accustomed to on-screen. When a group of scientists at a remote research facility go missing, Danvers is forced to team up with Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), an Indigenous trooper (and veteran) with whom she has a fraught past.
When we first meet Navarro, she is arresting a guy for domestic violence. He calls her a pig. Later, she’ll tell Danvers that a possibly related case of a missing Indigenous woman went unsolved because of her race. Danvers will dismiss this with an eye roll. When Leah goes to a protest, one of the activists asks if she’s the police chief’s daughter. Leah starts to apologize and the activist assures her “all are welcome.” Danvers and Navarro often enter buildings without a warrant. They beat people up due to their own emotional problems. And then beat up other people to torture information out of them. (It works!) Again and again, the show reinforces the narrative of the damaged edgy cops who don’t play by the rules but get the job done. At one point, Navarro beats up another cop who was abusing his power at a protest. That cop is immediately suspended. You see, women cops are good. Men cops can be bad but they quickly face consequences. So says the world of this show and the media landscape in general.
Again, it’s not just that these narratives are harmful. It’s that they’re boring. Foster and Reis are both excellent, but their emotional struggles and outbursts of violence feel like something out of a cop show parody. Making them women doesn’t make them interesting.
The show is just as cliché in its portrayal of Indigenous people. The case of the missing scientists ends up being tied to the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, a topic that many seem to only care about as a storytelling device for their tales of hero cops and as an excuse to show dead Indigenous people on-screen. López has said it was important for this not to be a story of white cops saving the day. But the primary arc of the show is still Danvers learning to mildly care about the Indigenous people in her community — including her own step-daughter. Navarro and her family experience a lot of trauma related to their identity as Indigenous people, but again and again the show prioritizes Navarro’s chosen identity of cop. If her decision to fight back against the one cop abusing his power is meant to show a change, it feels hollow given all that precedes and all that follows.
Ultimately, I would rather a show where Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey swish around being chauvinist cops than one that uses MMIW and Indigenous communities being poisoned by oil companies as a mere backdrop for the same boring cop tropes. There’s nothing progressive about adopting real, urgent issues into the folds of conservative fantasy.
If you want to watch True Detective: Night Country and feel your brain massaged by the simplicity of heroic police brutality and detectives who have to go rogue when they get shut down by the higher ups, be my guest. Everything you watch doesn’t have to be ethical. But don’t slurp up that garbage and then pat yourself on the back because it pays lip service to issues that really matter.
Keep watching your cop shows. You don’t get to feel good about it.
True Detective: Night Country premieres tonight on HBO.
