Crime TV Heroes: What a ‘True Detective’ season 3 could learn from its past
We’re back with another CarterMatt feature for the month of April, and this time around, we’re exploring the concept of what it means to be a Crime TV Hero. What are some of the good traits, and how can these be implemented in future stories? What do these people still have to learn? In this series, we’re going to be looking in the past in order to look towards the future.
For many of these articles, we will be pinning things down and looking at specific characters … but that’s going to be rather hard for “True Detective” season 3 given that this is a show with a different lead for every season. Also, there is at present still no word on if we’re even going to get a season 3 after the mess that was a season 2, but we’d welcome it with open arms provided that there is a little bit more time put into changing things around and shaking our personal expectations.
So for the sake of this article, we’re looking to look at a future hero for this show through the lens of Martin Hart, Rust Cohle, Ray Velcoro, and others from the first two seasons of the series.
What makes them heroes – A commitment to trying to uphold the law is really what tops the list. Fundamentally at their core, they want to get bad people off the street. Unfortunately these three all have their own respective demons, and in many ways they cause more problems for themselves than they really should. Maybe their focus to their work causes them to in some ways have tunnel vision.
What can be learned – A future “True Detective” lead does obviously need the sort of steely-eyed determination that we’ve seen from some of these past leads, but at the same time, they almost may need to learn the error of their ways if that is possible. We’d actually like to see something more akin to an inherently good man or women trying to keep it together, whose faults lie more directly at the foot of the job. For example, what if they are framed, or find themselves the victim of a vast conspiracy within a precinct? Not every detective within this franchise needs to live the worst life possible in order to do their job.
Ideas for the future – The next lead for “True Detective” or any other show that creator Nic Pizzolatto comes up with should be able to compartmentalize perhaps a little bit better than especially someone like Velcoro, and also not be so enveloped in darkness. It’s more effective to see a fall from grace when they start in a happy place, or have some sort of sense of humor. We want to see them get their adversary, but as mentioned, what happens if the adversary gets them first? We’d like to see more of a corrupting from the inside in, where the opponents are a little more easily identifiable than a mysterious Yellow King.