Not even nay-sayers or Nic Pizzolatto devotees could rain on Issa López’s parade after, despite the controversy, HBO renewed True Detective for a new season, with the Night Country showrunner set to return. After López took over from the Italian-American series creator Pizzolatto as the showrunner for Night Country, it didn’t take long for it to become the latest entry in the canon of unreasonably targeted and hated female-led projects in male-dominated spaces.
The first season of True Detective might be worshipped among a certain best-avoided subsection of male social media users, but López’s Night Country broke all the viewership records, beating the likes of Succession, Tokyo Vice, and Young Sheldon to the top spot of Max’s most-streamed shows globally, per FlixPatrol. Season 4 drew in 12.7 million cross-platform viewers to become the show’s most-watched installment to date, Variety reported. It has spent 23 days on FlixPatrol’s Max Top 10, taking the first-place crown in over 40 countries.
Night Country stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as Detectives Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, who investigate the disappearance of eight men from a research station in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. Following the first episode’s release on Jan. 14, numerous half-star and one-star reviews flooded the show’s Rotten Tomatoes page, among many other, much more positive comments, leading López to accuse haters of an attempt to sabotage her season. The excessive backlash found online despite a harmless, if imperfect, season backs the showrunner’s accusations.
Leave it to a magazine that hasn’t been relevant in fifty years to get this so wrong. True Detective: Night County is absolutely abysmal. Terrible writing, wooden acting, and awful CGI. Don’t waste your time on this piece of trash!
— Kevin Keough (@kevinkeough39) February 19, 2024
Meanwhile, Pizzolatto was ungracefully stoking the fire on his Instagram page by sharing some shockingly destructive rants about López’s season. “Just want to send love to Nic Pizzolatto. I can only imagine how it feels to have his all-time classic dialogue butchered and misappropriated like it was last night. (…) So insulting calling it True Detective,” one of them said.
The season’s 92 percent critical Rotten Tomatoes score, based on 190 professional reviews, begs to differ. Season 2, written by Pizzolatto, and largely considered the show’s weakest, sits at 47 percent. Unlike its Alaskan setting, Night Country was warmly received by the majority of viewers.
True Detective: Night Country is available to stream in full now on Max.