Watching the detectives 3

TRUE DETECTIVE series 4 has a few great weird-crime scenes, but it remains a disappointment, overall. What was all the fuss about? OK, so NIGHT COUNTRY marks Jodie Foster’s TV-star debut, but very late to a subgenre party, after the likes of Holly Hunter (who made her Saving Grace cop-show 15+ years ago). Owing a substantial debt for its eerie atmosphere to weird-SF masterpiece, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), the main problem with TD 4, as a crime drama, is that far too much basic TV soap-opera is thinly disguised as standard character-study (see Hilary Swank’s Alaska Daily, about a NYC journalist in Anchorage, for a rather better example). Perhaps, the final crushing blow to NIGHT COUNTRY, as a mystery horror-show entertainment, is that it never quite manages to match, or avoid comparisons with, David Slade’s vampire thriller 30 Days Of Night (2007), which made witty use of its menacing darkness scenario. Good to see Christopher Eccleston has finally escaped from any lingering side-effects from his Doctor Who stint, but, honestly, Fiona Shaw, as loonily eccentric Rose, so easily out-shines everybody here, that she’s the scariest - and the funniest - part of this series. 

Too much of a soap-opera for my taste, MARE OF EASTTOWN stars Kate Winslet for six episodes about a detective-sergeant in Pennsylvania, tackling a local serial-killer case. There are hopelessly broken homes, grimly dysfunctional families, and it’s all, so often (intentionally!) bleakly melodramatic, with sit-com TV humour, it’s a wonder that nobody dies laughing. Whodunit plotting usually feels like crudely unsavoury back-drop material, that is intrusive, yet lacking much authentic cop-show appeal, beyond some blithely stupid behaviours by cruel kids, and various parents - who, of course, should know better. Churchy folks have no answers for the community's failures that are predictable, not simply unfortunate, like any neighbourhood tragedy. “Doing something great is over-rated” sounds like a TV signature line but, despite narrative possibilities for redemption through accepting personal challenges, the hard truth is that most do-gooders don’t get a second chance to do the right thing. Potential love-interests for nominal-heroine Mare (nicknamed: ‘Lady Hawk’), are teacher Richard (Guy Pearce), and sympathetic but doomed detective Colin (Evan Peters, Quicksilver in X-Men prequels). Mare’s grouchy mother Helen (Jean Smart), sometimes making an effective comic-relief granny, is good fun. Super-freckly Lori (Julianne Nicholson) is routinely excellent, deserving her Emmy more than Winslet did. Sadly, a climactic shoot-out for the kidnappings does not 'finalise' the chaotic crime traumas here. Obviously, this extended tangle of revelations about unplanned parenting and unsolvable family problems will end in tears. The closing twist is unconvincing, but... “After a while, you learn to live with the unacceptable.”