Will True Detective season 2 suffer a sophomore slump?
By Josh Hill
With the incredible first season of True Detective behind us and the highly anticipated second season still ahead, fans everywhere have questions that won’t be answered for some time but will be pondered endlessly even after the have been answered.
Most of the questions surround the casting and the plot details, but one of the most important questions that is being assumed already is will the second season of True Detective be any good?
It’s almost blasphemous to consider the second season being anything but good, however there’s nothing concrete that says True Detective will be any good in the second season. To be fair, ‘good’ is an relative term here as the first season has set the bar so incredibly high that the second season may not be able to clear it.
That doesn’t mean the second season will be bad, it just means the target for it hitting another bullseye is dramatically more narrow than the first time around. We have an expectation about the quality of the show and should that expectation fail to be met in even the slightest way, the show will have major detractors.
We must also consider the subject matter, as this first season was a winding road of mysterious and bizarre things that we didn’t understand and still don’t. It’s been said that the series will deal with the fringe elements of serial killings and we saw that with the occult in season one.
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But what will season two focus on? We can’t have a recycled plot line of the same mystery set in a different backdrop with new characters solving a similar crime. It’s been said that the new season will deal with conspiracies in 1950s California, which is the type of departure from the first season that the second needs as the disjointed nature of the separate seasons is both a blessing an a curse.
It’s unfair to judge the second season before it’s even done being written, but we have to consider that our expectations may be too high. A ‘failed’ second season may ultimately be the fault of the viewer more so than the fault of the writing.