I've been hanging on, giving this season the benefit of the doubt every chance I could, but episode four finally broke me.
Just utter, repetitive nothingness. Masked by a solid soundtrack that made it feel far more "prestige" than it actually was.
In any other even halfway effective detective show/murder mystery, with a killer on the loose, there's a palpable threat that he or she is going to strike again, until they *do* strike again, thus upping the stakes, causing that ticking clock to tick louder and louder.
Here? We get an opening set of murders… and then nothing but uninteresting melodrama, rooted in unending background exposition, for four straight episodes. Which worked surprisingly well for the first couple of episodes, but to then give us two episodes beyond that of these people doing little more than tending to rote family drama and driving around in the snow, with minimal detective work in the fringes, on a case that seems to pose no tangible threat to the here and now… no thanks.
Every once in a blue moon, giving one of these shows to an inexperienced showrunner works - as it did with season one - but the vast majority of the time the results are boring at best, disastrous at worst, and Issa Lopez falls right in between the latter two. She should have either never been given so much authority, or HBO should have done a way better job supporting/noting her, because this just isn't it.
I'll finish the season/next two episodes out of morbid curiosity, but man, what a let down. Not even in comparison to past
True Detective seasons, but detective shows in general.