In its three previous outings, the HBO anthology series True Detective used police work to explore and defend masculine virtues. The show’s new season abandons that project, inaugurating instead a novel television genre in which radical environmentalism, racial complaint, and the occult vie for narrative supremacy. Call it woke Gothic. Or don’t call it anything at all. An awful True Detective season can’t hurt you if you decline to watch it.
TD4 (aka True Detective: Night Country) takes place in Ennis, Alaska, a fictional village in the general vicinity of Fairbanks. Like many a company town, Ennis suffers from employer-resident tensions attributable to no single cause. Yes, the local mining concern may be polluting the water, but the area’s Inuit population would resent its presence on the land regardless. Something similar is true of a nearby research outpost that treats Indigenous people as little more than a source of cheap janitorial labor.
