The underwhelming, undercooked True Detective finale

What a letdown

True Detective
(Image credit: HBO/James Bridges)

There's a subset of the audience that wouldn't have been satisfied with the True Detective finale unless Cthulu himself had risen out of the Louisiana bayou. Over the past eight weeks, some 10 million viewers have followed protagonists Rust Cohle and Marty Hart into the rabbit hole of the HBO crime drama, and none of us knew how far down we'd go, or how strange the journey might turn out to be.

More than any recent crime drama — and there are many, many other recent crime dramas — True Detective has turned its fans into detectives. This is a show that feels almost reverse-engineered for the Reddit age; its splintered timelines, deliberately repetitive motifs, and winking references to weird fiction icons like Robert Chambers inspired the same kind of obsessive analysis that turned Lost into a hit. (And, of course, there were no shortage of publications who eagerly abetted the show's meteoric rise by trawling Reddit for True Detective theories and compiling them into clickbait posts.) Last night's season finale was one of those rare pockets of "event television" — so eagerly anticipated that the glut of people trying to stream it simultaneously literally shut down HBOGO.

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Scott Meslow

Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.