As the dust settles on the “True Detective” finale, and the adventures of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart fade into the television firmament like the distant stars they found so meaningful, at least one thing is clear: it didn’t quite end the way we wanted it to. There is no doubt that the writer, Nic Pizzolatto, and director, Cary Fukunaga, pulled off a midseason coup, giving us a show in the January doldrums that caused temporary mass insanity. Like one of Rust’s intoxicating philosophical koans about sentient meat, “True Detective” cast a kind of spell over its viewers, convincing them that no matter what it was they were watching it was at the very least something worth the hours of debating, clicking, parsing, and comment-section feuding.
Moreover, the gorgeous cinematography depicting Louisiana in the gloaming, the delectable short-anthology format, and the movie-star bona fides made us believe that we were watching something novelistic, even approaching the level of high art. The comments that Pizzolatto gave along the way helped that interpretation: he asserted that the show was not interested in genre, in being a typical cop procedural. So the loyal waited, and withheld final judgment. About halfway through the season, critics like Emily Nussbaum began to poke holes in the series, calling into question its shaky use of women and its dorm-room rhapsodies. Fans and skeptics hurled Twitter bile back and forth; no one budged. It was up to the show’s finale for one side to be declared triumphant. Then the finale happened.
No matter what camp you were in when the show started (and I was in the camp that wanted to believe up until the bitter end), it is hard going to fully praise the series finale. After all the Googling about Cthulhu and eighteen-nineties horror stories, we were left with a fairly maudlin buddy-cops-take-down-a-psychopath-and-bond-for-life story. Instead of a supernatural twist or dark existential nothingness, we got a mashup of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Grumpy Old Men.” What happened to the grand conspiracy? What about Audrey’s sketches? Rust’s final revelation in the cosmos felt drastically unearned. And, even if the finale did work for you, it will be difficult to look back on the feverish reception of the first season of “True Detective” and not feel sheepish about the hours logged deciphering it. In a few short months, “Time is a flat circle” is going to sound as tinny and stale as Steve Urkel’s “Did I do that?”
You may have been one of the lucky ones to watch “True Detective” in a cultural vacuum, unfazed by the swarm of expectation and the mob mentality that now surrounds the majority of our quality programming. If the mob missed you, you likely consumed the show the way Pizzolatto intended (in a recent interview, he seemed aghast that people had gone so far down the rabbit hole as to buy Robert Chambers’s “The King in Yellow,” exhorting them to buy his own novel or read the Bible instead). But the rest of us are consuming weekly TV in a new way, with one eye on the screen and the other on the Internet, and for this type of viewer, series finales carry more weight than ever before. When I heard pleas from several friends in the week leading up to the last episode that “True Detective” would “stick the landing,” it wasn’t just out of a hope that the narrative would tie up in a satisfying catharsis. The statement was filled with more anxiety than that—the need for a tangible return on obsessive investment.
This week, David Carr wrote a column in the Times about how television has eclipsed movies and books as our intellectual common ground, the only watercooler that really matters. As accomplished directors, writers, and screen actors turn to television as an outlet (and more and more companies are doubling down on high-level programming, from Amazon to Microsoft), we expect to be showered in rich stories and lush worlds, deluged with shows that are both entertaining and dense enough to analyze. For a while now, talking about television has no longer consisted of repeating jokes from “Seinfeld” near the office coffee machine. In the so-called golden age of quality shows (and the ensuing boom of intricate TV criticism), every viewer can feel like an expert on camera angles, acting chops, and subtext. We are reading our shows like novels now, even when they don’t deserve it. And, as with novels, the endings matter; it’s highly possible for a show to unravel the long pleasure of the journey with a clumsy third act.
Many of the best finales of television came as part of the first wave of risky cable—“Deadwood,” “The Wire,” “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under.” Without daily Web commentary and other distractions to interrupt the flow of viewers’ week-to-week emotional investment, these shows were allowed a more organic, less anxious denouement, building elegant, tonally correct final statements of purpose. The “Six Feet Under” finale, which played out every character’s death over Sia’s haunting “Breathe Me,” remains a high point of HBO history, as does the “Sopranos” finale, which ends in a diner, mid-Journey song, as Tony awaits a final showdown with the man in the Members Only jacket. The “Sopranos” finale might have been infuriating—that sudden cut to black! Did the cable go out?—but it cemented David Chase’s vision for the show, a portrait of a man who was always teetering on destruction and whose life could end at any time, no matter what the jukebox was playing.
Today’s showrunners still have the opportunity to distill their point of view into a single final episode—most finales are written and produced before the mob descends to decide how it should be done—but the stakes are bigger now, as the audience expects (and demands) brilliance in the final act. There are two distinct ways to watch television: to let it wash over you like pure popcorn entertainment (as I do with soaps like “Nashville” and “Scandal,” and comedies like “Broad City” and “New Girl”), or to approach it as a serious text, capable of withstanding repeat viewings and deep conversations and, in theory, ambitious hopes for a graceful finale.
If we are following David Carr and anointing our television creators as the new kings and queens of culture, narrative geniuses walking among us (as we once did novelists—in 1841, crowds mobbed steamships coming from London to hear the next installment of Little Nell’s journey in “The Old Curiosity Shop”), then we have the right to expect them to deliver a holistic, affecting product from start to finish. Recent triumphs like “Breaking Bad,” in which Vince Gilligan wrapped up a show with clarity and heart amid the highest possible expectations, whet our desire that every show do the same. This may be as fruitless a pursuit as demanding that every play be Shakespeare or that every novel be Tolstoy, but it’s where we are.
The disappointment of the “True Detective” finale suggests how we are entering a confusing and precarious time in television’s evolution: we approach a show as an artistic achievement with all the privileges and responsibilities that this brings, when we may have done better to embrace it instead as pleasurable genre trash. (Trash in the purest, most joyful Pauline Kael sense of the word.) If we had accepted “True Detective” as a gothic procedural (albeit one with snappy dialogue and an undeniable woman problem) instead of as the latest incarnation of highbrow TV, then the last episode may not have felt as deflated (or defining) as it did. As Rust said to Marty, “You have to be careful about what you get good at.” We have to be careful about the shows we choose to make into Trojan horses, packed with meaning and insight. Sometimes what we are watching contains multitudes, and sometimes there’s nothing inside but air.
I am reminded of the finale of another HBO show that ended last year, Mike White’s remarkable “Enlightened,” a show that was undervalued at the time (and read the wrong way—many saw it as a kooky New Age comedy with a neurotic narrator, when it is really a crystalline drama about the delicate worker-drone psyche that can be unpacked for years to come). At the end of that show, Amy Jellicoe has exposed her company’s malfeasance to the public, finally realizing her higher purpose and emerging from her sallow basement office into the bright future of conscientious activism. “You can walk out of the darkness and into the light,” she says, in the show’s end moments. It is a lot like Rust Cohle’s final statement, that, up in the night sky, “The light is winning.” But I think that, years from now, only one of these sentiments will last beyond the initial fervor. If television is the new literature, I know which show I’d want to read again and again.
