True Detective

[so sorry]

Holy shit this was a great season!!!!

Ali and Dorff were fantastic. Although the young Dorff wasn't always convincing (makeup wise), I thought this was his best work since The Gate.

But seriously, Dorff was awesome.

True Detective is BACK to being a quality show.

I definetly want to add this to my watchlist when I get thru the Jack Ryan season on Amazon. Hopefully squeeze all this in in March before my brain switches 100% to GoT.

[TheBaxter]

i added back HBO for GoT, and watched this show in the meantime. S3 was very good, a bit slow at times in the early going, and very reminiscent of S1 without feeling too derivative. it felt like it was headed that way at times, but they smartly avoided going down that path, and how things end ultimately made it much more about the characters and their relationships, than about the central mystery, which i think was a wise way to go.

i did feel the timeline switching was a bit much at times. particularly between 1980 and 1990, sometimes it was hard to tell right away which timeline they were on, especially with Hays' character who looked pretty similar in both timelines. but ultimately it did work most of the time.

S1 was still the best. S3 is still bad. this season was not as good as S1, but much closer to it than to S2.

[Ribbons]

I just finished watching season 3 as well, and I kind of liked it. I wasn't wild about the idea to straight-up copy season 1 in most respects (except for the black people) -- to the extent where they had to stop and mention how eerily similar both were on the show itself -- but the ending was much stronger. In all three seasons of the show, Pizzolato seems particularly interested in the disparity between detective "narratives" and true life, and I think this story conveyed that in the most thoughtful and profound way, with an aging, retired cop who never got the closure that he sought and who now struggles to remember the clues even when they're standing right in front of him. The performances were strong across the board... a real departure from season 2, where everyone was almost uniformly awful. I would say Scoot McNairy was the standout, whose grief and frustration was palpable and heartbreaking. Mahershala Ali was good too, in a more reserved role, though I had a hard time understanding his Old Man Voice. He and Stephen Dorff had good chemistry. Overall it was a nice turnaround for a series that appeared to be dead after a disastrous sophomore effort, though I hope they don't just do another redneck sex cult thing next time around.