While the HBO series True Detective: Night Country may have wrapped up its season-long arc last Sunday, a new mystery emerged from the show only after the finale aired: Why would its original creator throw barbs at his own show?
In the wake of the finale, Nic Pizzolatto, who had a writing credit on every episode of the first three seasons but was only on board as executive producer this time, reposted to his Instagram stories complaints from several commenters about Night Country, and comments praising earlier seasons. (“I just want to send love to @nicpizzolatto,” one of them read. “I can only imagine how it feels to have his all-time classic dialogue butchered and misappropriated like it was last night.”) It wasn’t the first time Pizzolatto threw shade at the series either, although in the previous instance he had the good sense to delete his shade-throwing Twitter replies shortly after posting them. (“I certainly did not have any input on this story or anything else,” he wrote. “Can’t blame me.”) Taken together, the writer’s actions throughout this latest season’s run represent a masterclass in how not to move on from a project. From a career standpoint, there are a few lessons that stand out.
Pizzolatto sparked a legitimate TV phenomenon with the first season of True Detective. The early-2014 show wrangled killer performances out of stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson and its Southern Gothic-drenched, cult-adjacent mystery kept viewers exploding Reddit’s bandwidth with Yellow King theories from week to week. It also elevated series director Cary Joji Fukunaga to the point where he was directing Bond movies, and opened practically any door Pizzolatto might want to walk through.
Save for a pair of screenplays—2016’s Magnificent Seven remake and The Guilty in 2021—he ended up mostly remaining behind the door marked “True Detective,” where he wrote a widely panned second season in 2015 and a critically adored third in 2019, which was still far from a phenomenon. Although he initially expressed interest in exploring a fourth season, Pizzolatto ended up signing an overall production deal with Fox 21 Television Studios and FX Productions in early 2020, announcing a planned FX series called Redeemer, which would reunite the writer with McConaughey. By the time McConaughey pulled out of the project a year later, HBO executives had already announced that they were talking with other creators about taking the reins on a potential fourth season of True Detective.
That honor eventually fell to Issa López, who made a splash in 2017 with her debut feature, the low-budget horror indie, Tigers Are Not Afraid. López’s vision for her season was an inversion of the original—trading its starring male duo for Jodie Foster and erstwhile boxing champ Kali Reis, its sweaty Southern setting for chilly Alaska, and its hints of supernatural elements for outright bodily possession. However, as she claimed in an interview following Pizzolatto’s first disparaging marks, López created her season from a place of reverence for the original.
“I wrote this with profound love for the work he made and love for the people who loved it,” she said. “And it is a reinvention, and it is different, and it’s done with the idea of sitting down around the fire, and [let’s] have some fun and have some feelings and have some thoughts. And anybody who wants to join is welcome.”
As for her thoughts on Pizzolatto’s initial comments, she responded diplomatically, saying, “I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them. That’s his prerogative.”
Fourth-season star Reis, however, was decidedly less diplomatic in her assessment.
The finale drew 3.2 million across HBO and Max, coming in 57% higher than its premiere, which, according to Variety, indicates strong word-of-mouth throughout the season. Nobody has any firm idea how this season will come to be viewed within the context of the whole series, and for Pizzolatto to share random negative opinions as though they represent some kind of vindicating consensus for him came off to many as tacky and rude—especially when Night Country’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, which was allegedly cratered by trolls at first, now stands higher than that of True Detective season 3. (So many people found it rude, in fact, that Pizzolatto has since put up an Instagram post kindly asking commenters to leave their vitriol there instead of on other posts about his family.)
Although there are certain instances when it makes sense to speak out against a workplace, colleague, or former boss—such as unethical behavior or mistreatment—most of the time, burning bridges is a poor career move. If Steve Jobs had publicly spoken ill of Apple after being forced out in 1992, he might never have returned to the company five years later when Apple acquired his subsequent startup, NeXT. And when Jack Dorsey trashes Elon Musk’s handling of the company he helped build, at least he does it with his whole chest and cites specific examples of where his successor has gone wrong. Lobbing tiny bombs from the shadows—and using other people’s words to do it—comes across as petty venting.
If True Detective ends up getting renewed for a fifth season and Pizzolatto remains barely (or un)involved, the reasons why will be easy enough to piece together.
