True Detective, season two is finally over. Poor Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch are all good actors, but had their talents squandered on dialogue that was apparently so opaque it requires several thousand words to even mostly explain. Showrunner and bear Nic Pizzolatto has taken a perhaps slightly unfair amount of criticism. After aggressively painting himself as a "brooding, tortured masculine artist" and lashing out at the mere hint of reasonable criticism, he'd primed critics (and many TV fans) to respond negatively to the new season, which theydidwithglee. Or, if not glee, at least a certain sense of righteous satisfaction. Time and intellectual space are limited, and in a medium with so much innovative material and where even network executives admit to content overload, everyone has to spend their nights writing and thinking about a bunch of brooding, boring cops created by a guy who consistently tells everyone who great he is? No one planning to seriously write about True Detective should have decided to bury Pizzolatto going into the season, but it's not surprising that he gave himself a much higher standard of quality, and, accordingly, not surprising that even The New York Times made a merciless video asking fans to try to explain just what was going on with this season (spoiler alert: they failed).
But the season isn't without its defenders, even when they have to go to kind of unreasonable lengths to do so. Writing for The Daily Beast, Marlow Stern claims that the reputation of this season will be rehabilitated in a few years. He argues:
Whether by design or not, Pizzolatto has created a tremendously entertaining, campy neo-noir that will, years from now, be celebrated as a cult favorite. Where else can you see Tim Riggins play a closeted gay biker cop who pops Viagra to sex women, the chatterbox from Swingers ripping out a 400-pound pimp's gold grill with pliers, Regina George slicing-and-dicing an orgy security guard, or Colin Farrell threatening to butt-fuck a small child's father on his family's front lawn with his mom's headless corpse?This may well be true, but it's also one of the most damning types of praise imaginable -- suggesting that the show stumbled so badly that, many years in the future, it will be treated as a sort of prestige TV version of The Room, something so bad that college students will get really stoned and laugh at its sheer overwrought insanity. "Did anyone actually think this was good in 2015?" they will ask.
If that's the case, then maybe Pizzolatto's best bet is to go all-in on True Detective season three as an intentionally campy, insane, melodramatic piece of trash. And since it's never too early to restart a new round of True Detective fantasy-casting memes, we sat down and asked ourselves: Who should be in the balls-out, admittedly-terrible version of True Detective season three that, as of now, exists only within the minds of our fellow humans on the internet? Some possibilities:
Hugh Grant, Zac Efron, and Morgan Freeman
Grant plays the embattled older cop trying to give young hotshot rookie Zac Efron (who is also his son) a good experience for his first day on the job. Cult leader Morgan Freeman, who has built a religious community on a shared love of jazzercise, has other ideas.
Elmo! #gogodididonyc@TwoPlaysInReppic.twitter.com/1NUvjFpyet
-- Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) September 13, 2013True D moves into sci-fi in this extended remake of the "Bad Blood" video, starring Stewart and McKellen as aging freedom fighters (and mostly-true detectives) in a space dystopia trying to find the secrets of a brilliant young inventor who could undo the past (Swift).
Everyone Who Has Ever Played the Leader of the Losing Crew in a Dance Movie
This one is just a classic revenge story, with a fantastic soundtrack of early '00s jams.
The Original Cast of The Real Housewives of New York
Countess LuAnn, O.G. Saved by the Bell PA Bethenny Frankel, Ramona Singer, Jill Zarin and Alex McCord back together again and ready to stare wistfully across some water (because this season is a locked-room murder mystery and also it takes place on a fishing boat off the coast of Alaska). Just admit it. You would watch this. And love it.
The Tune SquadIf we're going to get a Space Jam 2, let's get it with a little existential misery thrown in.