The new series of ‘True Detective’ is facing heat for putting women in charge
Last night, True Detective premiered the first episode of its fourth season. Following an investigation into the disappearance of eight men in Alaska, it saw the eponymous detectives being taken on by heavyweight Jodie Foster and boxer turned actor Kali Reis. Though the anthology series has offered up a female detective before – season two featured Rachel McAdams as Sergeant Ani Bezzerides – season four marks the first time both the central roles have been assumed by women. And it’s safe to say that a select few online have made us painfully aware of that.
While critics have been fairly unanimous in their praise of the first episode, calling it “better than ever before”, pockets of the show’s online fanbase have told a different story. True Detective’s showrunner, Issa López, even took to X to call out the “bros and hardcore fanboys [sic]” that have “made it a mission” to drag down the episode’s score on Rotten Tomatoes. López has since deleted her original tweet, calling her comments a “generalization”, but the point stands: why do certain audiences have such an aversion to revisionist takes on classic genres?
Generalisation or not, López’s tweet says something pertinent about the people who purportedly love visual culture the most… They’re often men. More than that – and as López hinted – they breed a fandom culture that feels self-important, regressive and exclusionary. See also: the much discussed and perpetually controversial “film bro”.
If there is an essence of truth to what the fanboys are saying, it’s that True Detective does feel suitably 2024. Its theme tune is a Billie Eilish song and one of its leads called her character a “Karen” in a recent interview. It’s even attracted its own dose of controversy for the discrepancies between the narratives on-screen and the production of the programme: “pretty disappointing that for true detective s4 they did all this research and traveled to Alaska multiple times to dig up stories of communities and missing indigenous women only to film in Iceland for a tax break” said one user on X. Don’t get us wrong: none of these things are by any means bad. It’s just hard to imagine them happening back in 2014, when the first season of True Detective aired. And that in itself is enough to rile people up.
But taking the line of argument that True Detective has become part of what one user dubbed the “woke propaganda” is naive. It negates that the TV show isn’t exactly trying to create morally virtuous female characters. Rather, Chief Liz Danvers and Trooper Evangeline Navarro are complicated, thorny women: ones that continue True Detective’s efforts to bring some much-needed dimension to these archetypal roles.
In fact, while some people might not like to admit it, the latest episode of True Detective is just a microcosm of a broader trend within the genre. Ever since 2007’s The Killing – a Danish drama which saw Detective Inspector Sarah Lund being the one to get all Scooby Doo – there’s been a steady increase in women-led detective shows. Gillain Anderson took the reins in 2013’s The Fall, as did Olivia Coleman in Broadchurch, and Sarah Lancashire in Happy Valley. Across the pond (and way preceding all of these) you can look to shows like 1982’s Cagney and Lacey as evidence that True Detective is hardly doing anything new.
Basically, to any fanboys reading this: get a grip.
