True Detective - 'The Western Book of the Dead'

Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughan), Ani Bezzerides
(Rachael MacAdams) and Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch).

Last year, the first season of True Detective was one of the TV triumphs, so I was very happy to see a second series on the cards, and with an actual female character as well. 'The Western Book of the Dead' is almost an exercise in lowering my expectations to something that, hopefully, the rest of the series can meet.

Rust Cohle and Marty Hart were assholes, there's no denying, but Season 2 seems to be determined to top them. Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell in a 'tache) is a cop on the edge, apparently consumed with rage since his wife was raped* and then divorced him, limiting his access to their son (who might not be his.) He executes vigilante justice and consorts with the criminal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughan), a course which began when Semyon pointed him at his wife's assailant (in the episode's only flashback, marking a sea change from Season 1.) Semyon is trying to go straight, but feels threatened by an expose of corruption in their home town of Vinci, LA County.

If these were our protagonists, that might be all right, but there's more. Ani Bezzerides (Rachael MacAdams) is a tough cop with anger management issues and a troubled relationship with her CamPorn sister and hippy father (an almost unrecognisable David Morse in Moses chic.) We know she's got issues, because in her first scene she blows off the guy she slept with the night before when he wants to pursue a relationship, despite admitting surprise that she's into 'that'. And then there's Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a scarred veteran who finds more release riding his bike at high speed as a highway patrolman than with his girlfriend, and who has just been suspended because an actress accused him of soliciting a sex act.

All of this adds up to 58 minutes of Woodrugh strugling to connect with the world, Bezzerides getting drunk, picking fights and hiding weapons in her boots, and Velcoro viciously beating the father of a boy who bullied his son (having terrorised the name from the boy in the first place, which pretty well undercut every effort to portray a genuinely loving and tender father-son relationship elsewhere) before we finally get a crime that isn't perpetrated by the police. Actually, the crime does come earlier; we have shots of the body being driven around in a car, and Velcoro and his partner briefly explored the apartment of a missing city planner named Caspar, with connections to Semyon, but it is only in the closing moments that Woodrugh finds Caspar dead on Bezzerides patch, and the three cops are brought together over the body.

Season 1 of True Detective embraced the darkness of the human soul, but season 2 seems intent on rolling around in it, and it doesn't make for such compelling television. It doesn't help that the only female characters are defined sexually - an as-yet unseen rape victim, a cop whose first scene is about how kinky she is, a woman who offers favours to get out of a speeding ticket, and a pornographic actress. Actually, I tell a lie. Semyon's wife is so far a dutiful support, but not defined sexually, just by her social bond to a man.

"The fuck are you looking at?"

There are some traces of the weird aspects which made True Detective's first season unique, with Caspar's apartment decorated not just with elaborate exotica, but with robed and crowned skeletons. I hope there will be more of this in future episodes, and less of Colin Farrell yelling at children while he punches their parents.

* Marks removed for rape as character background, double for a woman's rape as a man's background