Last Night’s True Detective Featured a Co-Writer for the First Time

By Reuben Levine | Jul 13, 2015

True Detective is famous for a few things: being dark, broody, complex, and visually interesting, to name a few. But it’s also famous for being helmed by a single man, creator Nic Pizzolatto. That changed a little last night. True Detective’s fourth episode, “Down Will Come” was the first episode to feature another writer besides Pizzolatto.

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People that pay attention to this sort of thing would have noticed the name Scott Lasser appear in True Detective’s credits last night. Lasser is also listed as a co-writer on True Detective’s wikipedia page.

Lasser is an author with four books under his belt: Battle Creek (not related to the canceled Vince Giligan show,) All I Could Get, The Year That Follows, and Say Nice Things About Detroit.

Perhaps the episode’s co-authorship had something to do with it being the best episode of True Detective season two so far. We don’t know the full extent of Lasser’s work on the episode, but we now have a potential taste of what True Detective would be like with a writer other than Pizzolatto. Last night’s True Detective was still obviously True Detective, but it did a lot to further flesh out characters that could perviously reached be described by a single emotion.

Pizzolatto is listed as the sole writer for the remainder of True Detective season two, so it’s not as if this is the start of a trend. But it may be an avenue that Pizzolatto will choose to further experiment in the future. In a recent spread in Vanity Fair, Pizzolatto was painted as a man with a temper that doesn’t necessarily work well with a group of people. Such as your average writer’s room.

That very well could have something to do with Pizzolatto’s choice to work alone. True Detective exists a vacuum, but it doesn’t have to. Perhaps in the future well see more work from Pizzolatto, True Detective included, that involves a more normal writing setup.

Next: Let's analyze the preview for True Detective's fifth episode.

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