‘True Detective’ returns, stays true to powerful past

By Frazier Moore

AP Television Writer

NEW YORK

“True Detective” could drive you to drink. Its second season (tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO) arrives under cover of such darkness and psychic pain it seems to beg its audience to keep a bottle close by in a display of unity with its hard-drinking protagonists.

“You tying one on?” asks Frank Semyon (series star Vince Vaughn), an enterprising but beleaguered mobster, as he sits across from tormented Detective Ray Velcoro (co-star Colin Farrell) and watches him drain glass after glass of Frank’s pricey Johnny Walker Blue.

“Not particularly,” grunts Velcoro, filling his glass again.

Of course, if you were to tie one on while watching “True Detective” you might realize you’re not the sort of high-functioning alcoholic represented by Detective Velcoro, who serves the city of Vinci, a corrupt, industrially ravaged neighbor of Los Angeles. Or by Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), a hard-bitten Ventura County sheriff’s detective.

Stick to soft drinks. “True Detective” this season, even more than last, demands a viewer’s full attention to absorb the twisting, multilayered puzzle taunting Ray and Ani, along with Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a troubled war veteran and California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop, as well as Frank, whose make-or-break-him real-estate deal is thrown in jeopardy, as they all converge on a pivotal event: the eerie murder of a Vinci city official.

That, in a nutshell, is what this season’s “True Detective” encompasses: law-enforcement officers (the series title still applies) and attempts to find answers to a crime whose search is complicated by ulterior motives. (Hear Ray addressing a superior in a future episode: “One question. Am I supposed to solve this or not?”)

But what “True Detective” is this season may be no more important than how it differs from last season, which, of course, was a triumph starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as they tackled, in effect, not one but two roles apiece: former Louisiana State Police detectives being interrogated in 2012 about a homicide case that they were seen, in flashbacks, working in 1995.

Although Vaughn and Farrell are the nominal co-leads this season, and excellent, the new saga doesn’t call for last year’s two-man actors’ showcase in a dual time frame. These co-stars are fused into this season’s larger ensemble, in the present tense.

What truly ties the “True Detective” seasons together: the voice and vision of Nic Pizzolatto. He created the series, wrote all last year’s episodes and has repeated that feat for the upcoming eight hours. And he apparently has never heard the expression “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” having ditched the buddy-drama format that worked so well to do his thing in other, different ways this time.

How he’s done it should become increasingly evident beyond the three episodes made available for preview. But he clearly has retained last year’s “weird fiction” atmospherics of the Louisiana bayou despite relocating to an urban world. In this factory-and-refinery-choked corner of L.A., the macabre is in evidence, even in the interstitial aerial shots of tangled freeways, where cars look like corpuscles coursing through blood vessels.