Time is a flat circle. All of this has happened before and will happen again. The exception, of course, is season one of True Detective, because next season is going to be totally different. Buzzfeed took a break from posting animated GIFs of cats doing hilarious things and interviewed True Detective writer/creator Nic Pizzolato, who had a few things to say about his plans for the second season of the show.
Among the topics Pizzolato discussed was his now-deleted tweet hinting at female protagonists for season two:
I deleted the tweet because I didn’t want to be beholden to a promise and then change my mind. I’m writing Season 2 right now, but I don’t want to divulge any potentialities, because so much could change. I just never want to create from a place of critical placation — that’s a dead zone. So I don’t want, for instance, a gender-bias-critique to influence what I do.
In other words, he’s keeping his options open. He also discussed directors for the second season. Yes, directors. Plural. As in more than one. Cary Fukunaga, who has earned all sorts of critical praise for directing season one, will be focusing once again on directing movies instead of TV shows. Perhaps as a response to Fukunaga’s reported exhaustion at the intense demands of directing eight hour-long episodes of True Detective all by his lonesome, Pizzolato is planning on spreading the wealth next time around:
We don’t have any plans to work with one director again. It would be impossible to do this yearly as we need to be able to do post while we’re still filming, like any other show. There’s some great guys I’ve consulted, and we’re all confident we can achieve the same consistency.
Pizzolato is vetting directors for their ability to stay true to the visual style of the first season, though, and stated his desire to maintain “an authorial voice consistent with this season.” So Fukunaga’s influence will still likely be felt in future incarnations of the show, even as he is off getting mad rich directing a film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand.
There’s only one episode left in this season of True Detective, but man what a season it has been so far. No matter how this season wraps up, expectations will no doubt be high sky for the next one. Since Matthew McConaughey’s run as Rust Cohle has been one of the absolute best things about the show, Pizzolato will have his work cut out for him in keeping viewers on board once Cohle’s story is through. If he can maintain the heavy atmosphere and strong philosophical underpinnings the show has established thus far though, he might just pull it off.
