Reviews

This season has some of the worst writing, direction, acting, and use of music I've seen in such a prestigious HBO series. As it trudges along all we get are more tropes, cheap jump scares, and a million spirals to leach off the success of Season 1. Truth is, this is far closer to a weak Netflix original or even a CW show than it is any of the first 3 True Detective Seasons. Every character is unlikeable AND uninteresting somehow, and the way they talk to each other is so corny and unrealistic it reminds one of Tommy Wiseau more than Nic Pizzolatto at times. The initial mystery of the "corpsicle" was interesting, but none of the characters even seemed to care - just business as usual, I guess. Nobody reacts like a human in this show. It truly feels like it was written by AI. This episode continued Ep 3's trend of focusing on dull interpersonal dramas between flat caricature-characters, throwing in a few D-grade horror flourishes, and adding a laughable cliffhanger that's more confusing than mysterious. Who greenlit this disaster? For all his sometime-faults, Pizzolatto wrote genuinely thoughtful quality dialogue in those first 3 seasons. The quality of direction and cinematography was also far above what Night Country has given us so far. There's no momentum, no feeling, just tired tropes overlaid with breathy female-sung ballads like watching a TikTok reel some intern threw together with their Spotify playlist. Don't believe the critics: this is bad, and far below the high standard that HBO usually implies.