True Detective v. Fargo the Series v. Themselves
Happy Holidays! It's been a long time since the last post. With a new baby and a new job it's been very difficult to form a single, cogent thought, let alone several. At some point I will squeeze in another post so that they total 12 in a year.
But for the blog this holiday, here's an attempt at a more current topic.
The second season of TRUE DETECTIVE isn’t that bad, it’s just not very good. Most of all, it’s not exceptional in any of the ways that the first season was.
Another program though, which remains exceptional in its second season,
is FARGO, the FX Series.
No fight-bell this time, for these bouts are fought mostly within.
Both of these shows I have loved because they are, or have been genuinely exceptional. They are welcome as notable exceptions to the typical fare that populates dramatic primetime television.
Both shows have attempted to harness TV’s great potential as an art form. They are stories told with a true, perhaps grande, sense of scope, but they still contain themselves with a concrete goal in a tangible time-frame, having a definite conclusion to each story. This is the perfect kind of story to tell in a larger but limited set of one-hour-episodes. The number isn't pre-determined though. Eight hours is enough for, "True Detective," and ten works for, "Fargo." This is like the miniseries model, but better in a number of ways. The seasons have a thematic and cosmological connection but are otherwise unfettered by ongoing plot. These shows are free from being rushed or flashy in the way that a feature film or a network miniseries might be. The audience is given time to really perceive and experience the world with which they are presented. And since it is television, we are relaxed in our homes as we watch, having subscribed to a service rather than paying on the day, so the filmmakers are encouraged to explore and to bide their time. At the same time, this can add a pressure to deliver on other things, like mood and character, and real depth in general, but TV is better for it.
The second season of, "True Detective," has arrived with an air of (perhaps inevitable) disappointment, and even a little sadness in my case, but It would be spiteful of us, the audience, to disregard the great things previously, and some currently, achieved by the series. Compare the second season to most other primetime procedurals and it is superior, but when compared to its former self it definitely breaks down, especially from a formal perspective. Although there is a ton of talent evident, the whole doesn't equal the sum its parts. The real unignorable factor is Cary Fukunaga and his visionary direction of the entire first season. He is responsible for a great deal of the show's success, and when he is subtracted from the equation , the results are only half as remarkable. Also, previous to this project, Fukunaga accomplished the feat of making me enjoy, "Jane Eyre," which is no small task.
A big difference between the first and second season of, "True Detective," is that despite the big budget and significant creative freedom, season two looks and feels too much like other procedural crime shows. The season has plenty of elements working in it's favor. It is still truly a story meant to be told over eight hours, with the inciting crime not being solved in a single episode. The four leads are very talented performers with distinct personas and each plays a character with potential. Also the Cinematographer, Nigel Bluck and his crew capture some beautiful, accomplished images. All of these elements seem disparate though, much like the nature of the story and characters themselves, and nothing quite seems to meld. Nothing transcends, or feels unified the way it did in the first season.
The first season has a symbiosis throughout that becomes clear when contrasted with the second season, and a lot of that cohesion is due to Fukunaga's direction. He has a way of pulling things together visually and otherwise. Much has been said about the director's masterful, "Oner," (a long shot without a cut) from episode six, but let's look at some of the more subtle and effective moves he makes.
The opening sequence that starts off season one is immediately provocative and visually engaging in a way that the second season's opening is not. It also sets up the depth of the era-spanning narrative structure right away. The difference that Fukunaga makes becomes obvious with the imagery. We see three dark, tantalizing, lurid images. A silhouetted man in a field carries someone on his back. He lights a fire. The fire grows.
When and why did this happen? Someone will now tell us.
We are shown a lense, a "Record," icon, and then a slightly blurry Woody Harrelson.
He is Martin Hart, and this is his recorded statement.
The details elevate right away. Harrelson is out of focus very slightly, in the way that auto-focus cameras tend to make things, and his version of the story will be like that in the way that he prefers to tell it. And of course we know that yet another party is doing the recording, so the truth of the story is yet another step away. We will further come to understand, the first three images don't represent the end of the story, so here we are lead, and misdirected once again. The staging of these images and what they suggest is the work of a very talented director, and these visual devices will operate throughout the entire season.
The beginning of season two isn't as enticing and suggests a lack of vision.
We see a sunrise, and then four shots of markers in a field, one of which I've discluded here. This repetition is an attempt to make an unremarkable image more significant.
And then we are given Colin Farrell sitting in a car, as Ray Velcoro. Albeit expertly photographed, this is a rather standard shot we'd see in any primetime drama. This shot fails to hint at much beyond what it is, which is a setup of Velcoro's relationship with his son, who sits in the car opposite him.
Conversely in season one, a rather magnificent accomplishment that might seem insignificant at first, is the sense of place that it conveys so beautifully. But this is a key part of True Detective's success in the first season. Fukunaga finds ways to show the audience where things are and what they really look like, unlike many TV shows that have to fake their locations, and then end up indoors for long periods of time where everything looks the same. With Fukunaga at the helm, we feel ourselves placed along-side the characters and we have a sense of location and proximity within the show's environment, much of which is the lush landscape of Louisiana. There is a very subtle but effective visual motif that Fukunaga uses which makes a huge difference. There are a series of beautiful aerial shots throughout the first season in which Louisiana is laid out for us to see, but it's not just a matter of getting up in a helicopter and shooting highways and trees. In each of these shots we can actually see the car that the characters are in.
This makes a subtle but unmistakable difference in how the show involves the audience. These shots don't just act as single transitional elements. They are always an organic part of a sequence in which we are propelled along-side the characters.
I was hopeful for the second season when I saw this sort of a shot at the end of the first episode, when the three lead detectives have discovered the same car, and we see the meeting in relation to the environment. We pull back to this rather accomplished shot.
But alas, for the rest of the second season, we just get single, faceless aerial shots. Beautiful and amazing as they might be, they only serve to bridge two locations or scenes and do not include our characters.
Overall, there is a subtlety and nuance to Fukunaga's direction which the second season sorely lacks. Despite it's seemingly lurid subject manner, many scene's in season two merely feel like opportunities for talking heads to deliver dialogue with varying degree's of success, much like other typical criminal procedurals. Also, the show seems to have dropped season one's explorative, dynamic, era-leaping narrative structure, in favor of a more linear presentation of story and character, and this is frankly disappointing.
Season one has confidence in it's pacing, doling out narrative as it sees fit, allowing us to observe the world. The following is an example in which Fukunaga's direction exudes that quality.
In episode three, there is moment when Harrelson's Martin Hart and Matthew Mcconaughey's Rust Cole have been making rounds together, and they think they're close to a suspect. As they drive through the countryside they stop at a school that a victim has attended. At this point in the narrative this is not a hot lead, and this isn't where a dramatic interaction takes place. Rust leaves their car to talk to a man on a lawnmower in front of the school. He saunters over and has a rather banal exchange of information with the forgettable man. Back in the car, Martin gets an exciting call about their current suspect, and he's rearing to go.
He calls out the window to Rust who is taking his time with the man on the lawnmower.
In this shot, focus pulls from Mcconaughey to the car where Harrelson eagerly awaits, and it holds there, with Mcconaughey's out-of-focus face prominently hanging in the foreground. The shot lingers this way long enough for us to notice, and then it focuses back to Mcconaughey and finally let's him say, "Thank you for your time." We feel a subconcious desire to stay, but also the pull from Harrelson in the car and his news about the suspect.
We later learn of the importance of the man on the lawnmower, and the direction of this scene plants it securely in our minds with finesse and grace.
There is nothing so sophisticated in season two.
In the case of, "Fargo," the show has an even more daunting problem than having to live up to its first season. It has to live up to the Coen Brothers. It has managed to do this, not by parroting them, but by matching their capacity for invention, and in that spirit the show has conjured some witty visual techniques that let it swing in and out of events with a playful levity that cleverly separates it from the original film on which it is based. The show starts out by rightfully navigating its way through some appropriate homage. For example, the opening sequence enlists visuals both from a key scene in the original film and from another in, "Blood Simple," the Coens' debut film.
Here we see Billy-Bob Thornton's character hit a snag in his nefarious operations, and we have the first imagery of the white snow being tainted red. This first scene sets the frame-work for our expectations. Anyone familiar with the 1995 film will know these kinds of images, but the circumstances to which they are applied have been consistently upended and rearranged to achieve new and surprising results. The filmmakers have chosen some very effective ways to deviate from and sometimes improve upon the Coens' ideas and style. In this way "Fargo," the series, successfully becomes it's own entity.
Here, in the middle of the first episode, Martin Freeman's Lester Nygaard meets Billy-Bob's character from the opening scene, the man who will incite Lester's tragedy. This momentous occasion is marked by some lively camera work. A conspicuous overhead shot has Lester looking to the heavens for an answer to his persistent humiliations. Next is the show's first pointed camera move, a weightless pull-out to reveal an apparent response with the appearance of Thornton's Lorne Malvo, who seems rather inspired by Anton Chigurh.
This sort of invention shows how effectively elastic great TV can be in conveying things visually. This show is able to delight in stepping out of its established set of formal conventions.
"True Detective, and, "Fargo," have both afforded themselves the opportunity to leap forward or back in almost a grandiose way, that would be jarring in a shorter format or if the shows were on tamer networks. In much the same way that, "True Detective," leaps through time-spans in the first season, so does, "Fargo." In another example of, "Fargo," stepping out of its own visual convention we see it take the audience on a wild ride.
Sweeping left, off into the woods faster and faster, the show leaves it's characters for a year, time whizzing by as it sometimes does. This is another great shot that separates the show from the Coens' formalism and embraces its own. The spirit of invention lives in decisions like these though, and that is ultimately what makes the show great, whether or not the Coen Brothers are involved.
If only the makers of, "True Detective," had seen beyond the end of their noses in the second season, they could have held onto invention, and maybe Cary Fukunaga.
The second season of, "Fargo," has decided to up its ante and side-step problems simultaneously. It has gone backwards! This has allowed it to explore a new set of characters, settings and moods while still expanding on known characters and previous concepts.
The season starts out with a bold montage bringing us into the 70's and echoing the film look of the time. The split-screening in this opening happily carries on through many other sequences during the second season. We start out with the narrow size of the old TV screen.
By the end of the montage we arrive at the cinematic wide-screen we are currently thankful for.
On that note, we are currently thankful for the magic of, "Fargo," the series, holding strong as well, having managed to pull off another trick in the long shadow of the Coen Brothers. Whoever is running things on the show has some decent vision. May, "True Detective," rest in peace. It was well worth it once.
Will Tordella.
