Five years after the last season ended, and about as far as one can go from Arkansas, True Detective (premiering Sunday, Jan. 14 on HBO) returns us to the heart of dark crime thrillers with a new showrunner and a new, unusual location: Arctic Alaska.
Set entirely at night, during winter, the new season, written and directed by Issa López, follows two detectives (Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) as they investigate the mysterious disappearance of a group of research scientists.
“This is the type of role that we have not seen Jodie Foster play, and I think it’s so delightful and so naughty,” says López of the casting. “I’ve never had a collaborator like Jodie Foster. Not only is she, I think, the best actor of her generation, it’s such a pleasure to bring her into a role like that, back at the center of the conversation. She was so happy, having so much fun, and that sets the tone for the entire cast.”
This might surprise some viewers, considering the prickly, cantankerous (and extremely entertaining) nature of Foster’s character, Detective Liz Danvers. In fact, nearly every character here is battling their own inner demons in some way. This show is dark in more ways than one. Time becomes more elusive as the episodes progress without a single scene in daylight, but what stands out even more than that is how damaged some of these Arctic inhabitants are, and how grisly the crimes become. Maybe so much darkness will inevitably make people dark, too, or maybe they’re dysfunctional for other reasons, but there are very few healthy relationships in Ennis, Alaska, and more than a few ghosts — literal and otherwise.
“It’s a meditation on loneliness,” López explains. If any one word could describe this season, it would definitely be that one. Not just because this small Arctic town is rather isolated, cold to the point of being deadly and underpopulated, but because the only people who seem to have much of a family life or a community are the Indigenous population, who, amid the murder investigation, are rallying together to protest against a mining corporation that keeps half the town employed but is also slowly poisoning them with radioactive output. All of this eventually comes to a head, with locals at each other’s throats by the end.
Night Country is right on. With so many heavy topics at play, it’s a small miracle that the cast and crew were mostly unaffected by the dark mood that permeates the series, which was filmed in Iceland.
“We never got the blues,” López says. “I’m a Mexican who hates the cold. Nobody asked me to write this. But when I was there, it was so much fun. It was so incredible to be with this team. Iceland is gorgeous. Reykjavik is a beautiful tiny city with some of the best food in the world. A lot of the cast was Inuit, and they were in their element. And it was contagious, the enthusiasm and the love and the laughter. So, it was the opposite. When it was done and it was April and the days started to get longer, it was sad. It was hard to say goodbye to the long nights and go back into the world, which amazed us all.”
Still, you may want to watch this one with the lights on.