The ‘Deadwood’ creator comes aboard a potential third season.
It’s been a long, strange trip to be sure, and we’re not exactly there yet, but it would seem that the dark spot of gritty storytelling on the horizon could just be the long-awaited and thought-ill-fated third season of the HBO series True Detective.
Following abysmal second season ratings and response, Nic Pizzolatto’s crime-centric character study seemed destined for the televisual graveyard. Since season two bowed, there’s been no word either way as to the fate of True Detective, it’s just been sitting there in our cultural cloud, suspended in network ether. Most folks, myself included, have considered the show dead for at least a year of its two-year hiatus; Pizzolatto signing an additional development deal with HBO in 2016 seemed to be the final nail in the coffin, but then out of pretty much nowhere EW today dropped a pair of exclusive bombshells that reveal not only is a third season in the works, it’s getting an injection of top-notch talent behind the scenes.
Now, this is not a greenlight notification, the third season of True Detective has not been announced by HBO, so it’s still very possible nothing will ever materialize of all this, but EW has it that Pizzolatto has already completed the first two scripts of a tentative third season, and furthermore his writing team has been joined by none other than David Milch, the mastermind writer behind Deadwood and NYPD Blue. Note: this is a collaboration, not a takeover or a hand-off, Milch isn’t being made showrunner, the two writers are said to be genuinely crafting the rest of the season together.
Fans of spectacular television writing should be elated by this news. Deadwood is easily one of the top-three best-written shows of all-time (I personally put it at #2), and regardless of your feelings about Pizzolatto’s second stab at True Detective, it was still incredibly intelligent, thought-out, and narratively one of the most daring shows on TV. You put these two minds together, the possibilities are thrilling.
Again, no stones have been etched in regarding this news, but it is the first and only positive word we’ve gotten on True Detective season three since season two aired. So if you’re holding out hope, keep on holding, it might just work.
In other news and points of interest…
…A24 dropped a beautiful and haunting new poster for David Lowry’s upcoming A Ghost Story starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, as well as the first full trailer. Some folks are already calling the film one of the best of the year – and upon first look this writer is inclined to believe them – but whether it holds up to that or not, the real cause for celebration is that the actors and director have said they plan to reunite every couple of years to make small, intimate, character-driven dramas like this. A Ghost Story is their second collaboration, the first being Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which if you haven’t already seen you should as soon as possible.
…We got our first official look at Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander in costume as Lara Croft for the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot…
…If you’re one of our British readers, you have the chance to see a newly-restored, 4k version of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in theaters. The new trailer just dropped…
..and Miles Teller (Whiplash) has signed to play the lead in Too Old to Die Young, the upcoming crime thriller series for Amazon that’s co-written and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.
Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including a look back at Ghost in the Shell in advance of the live-action release, the plague of “the Dreamworks face,” what this past weekend’s box office might be saying about a pair of May releases, a defense of the underloved fantasy flick Ladyhawke, and a video detailing the purpose of Paul Thomas Anderson’s characters.
And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.
Related Topics: Culture, One Perfect Shot
