When Sharp Objects concluded its run last summer, opinion was decidedly split. Critics, most of whom watched the first seven episodes of the show all at once, loved it. Viewers who experienced it doled out week to week did not. The theory was floated that perhaps this was more than your average critic-vs.-public divide, that the “how” here was the x-factor.
When Bodyguard aired in the U.K. in September, its popularity grew week to week, becoming a cultural phenomenon before it was released in the U.S., all at once, on Netflix. It had a brief moment — maybe a weekend or two — of water-cooler relevancy stateside, but there’s little evidence American viewers felt the same tension or compulsion to watch that captured British audiences.
There’s rarely a guarantee for creators as to how viewers will consume their show. That streaming and VOD services exist at all complicates matters, as almost every viewer has the choice between watching in real-time and waiting until a show is available to binge. The second-wave popularity of a show like You felt tied to the ease of watching it in one weekend when it hit Netflix. And yet, even someone creating a Netflix Original, with data to back up the popularity of bingeing on that platform, can’t know for sure you won’t space the series out over time.
Regardless, it’s increasingly evident that how you watch a show can have real bearing on your enjoyment, opinion and experience of it. To put a finer point on it, we decided to assign two editors, Jake Walerius and Shea Corrigan, to watch the same show, one week-to-week and one bingeing.
In theory, the third season of True Detective was the perfect show for our experiment. It is algorithmically of a kind i.e. likely to be recommended by a computer, with both Sharp Objects and Bodyguard. Plus, it’s about an unsolved crime, so there’s a mystery to drive interest.
Unfortunately for our purposes, True Detective season 3’s failings made the form we watched the least notable driver of opinion. Nevertheless, Nic Pizzolatto’s third effort gave us a lot to talk about.
Before True Detective season 3 premiered in January, we answered a series of questions to try and calibrate our TV taste and viewing habits.
Did you watch the first two seasons of True Detective?
Jake: Yes.
Shea: Yes.
Do you remember whether you watched week-to-week or all at once?
Jake: I think I binged the first season over the course of about a week and watched the second season week-to-week.
Shea: I don’t really remember? I definitely did not watch in real time, but I also don’t remember it being a single-weekend type of thing. Season 2 was definitely not a binge-watch.
Did you like the first two seasons of True Detective?
Jake: Season 1 I really liked and season 2 was terrible.
Shea: I thought the first season was fine, and the second season worse. Generally, I did not think the first season was as great as everyone thought nor that the second was as terrible as everyone thought.
Approximately what percentage of your TV watching is binge-watching? (Let’s say 3+ hours at a time; i.e. if you watch two episodes at a time that is not binge-watching.)
Jake: I very rarely binge-watch, unless it’s BoJack Horseman.
Shea: Most? Maybe 70 percent. Which is less a reflection on how much I like to binge-watch and more how bad I am at keeping up with something week to week.
On a scale of one to 10, how excited are you for True Detective season 3? Why?
Jake: Six. I was 10/10 excited for season 2, but after season 2 expectations are tempered. My rating would be lower, but at this point it’s kind of interesting just to see whether season 1 or 2 was a more accurate reflection of the showrunner. I’m not particularly optimistic, but it will be interesting one way or another.
Shea: Initially a two. I was very excited when they announced the casting of Mahershala Ali, but then sometime since then I realized I don’t get all that amped up for stories about brooding men haunted by gruesome child crimes anymore. Then, I started seeing some reactions to screeners about how, uh, extremely bad the writing is and now I am an eight out of 10 for it as a hate-watch.
Then, Jake watched the season in real time, week by week. Once Shea had a chance to watch all eight episodes in two days, we compared notes.
Shea: Briefly, what did you think?
Jake: I thought it was bad. What did you think?
Shea: I also thought it was bad. I thought 75 percent of it was unoriginal and unengaging and then 25 percent of it was bonkers bad. What didn’t you like about it?
Jake: A lot but even besides all the dumb dialogue and terrible relationships basically nothing happened for like five of the eight episodes. I could have put up with the silliness if there was compelling whodunnit in the middle but there just wasn’t.
Shea: By episode 5, when the dad was breaking into mansions, I was curious enough or maybe just fed up that if I had less integrity (wasn’t doing this for this) I would have just pulled up the wiki to find out who did it. Speaking of, I always hate it when a whodunnit is not someone you could have possibly guessed and then they’re like “ah ha you never saw this coming.” Of course not.
That’s not clever.
Anyways, do you think watching week to week affected how compelling you found the mystery?
Jake: I think if it did anything it made me less interested. There were a couple real cliffhanger endings, the Woodard one and the one with the father, but because so much of the show was about the relationships rather than the case, I don’t feel like it really built any momentum.
Shea: I don’t really remember any distinct episode endings so the lack of cliffhangers checks out for me. I kept watching because I a) had to b) it was easy enough to autoplay but I never felt like I *had* to see what came next. Forcing myself to binge the first four episodes was hard.
How long do you think you would have watched without this? I would have probably bailed after the first week if I was watching week-to-week, and halfway through the first episode if I had all the episodes at once. I would have needed a lot of trusted recs that it got better to wait it out.
Jake: I definitely would have watched the first two episodes, which I though set up a solid whodunnit in the style of season 1, which I liked, but it lost its way a lot after that as it became bogged down in all the book stuff. If I lasted the season it only would have been because I don’t like dipping out of shows I’ve started, not because I felt I needed to know what happened.
People get over bloat, poor pacing, convoluted plot, etc. when they buy into bingeing something. But that was not my experience.
Shea: Do you think there’s anything the show did well that would suggest it’s better watched in either form? Or are its specific problems a barrier to the premise of this line of questioning?
I would think that being a mystery/crime show should mean it’s better binged because (as Netflix largely shows) people get over bloat, poor pacing, convoluted plot, etc. when they buy into bingeing something. But that was not my experience binge-watching.
Jake: No, I think the show being bad undermines the whole thing. I’ve definitely binged bad shows, and I think it’s more likely I would have finished this bingeing (assuming I didn’t have to watch it), but it wasn’t the sort of show that lends itself to bingeing anyway. There was just not enough forward progress from week to week.
But when you have time to think about all the ways it’s dumb, that’s not good. So my advice to all TV people is if you’re planning on making a bad show release all the episodes at once.
Shea: “It wasn’t the sort of show that lends itself to bingeing anyway.” You mean because of its specific problems? Because I think crime shows/mysteries absolutely lend themselves to bingeing.
But we can disagree on that, I’m just clarifying.
Jake: I think crime shows/mysteries do, but this particular crime/mystery seemed less interested in the mystery than the way the mystery impacted the people surrounding it, plus it was just bad.
Season 1 lent itself to bingeing for example, even if you didn’t think it was good.
Shea: I would agree. I also don’t think the multiple timelines helped. I thought they slowed everything down. I could have done without the entire 2015 timeline, to be honest. (True Criminal !!)
What do you think actually worked?
Jake: I enjoyed the performances mostly, especially Stephen Dorff. I thought the Woodard standoff scene was good. There were a few bits in the early episodes where it seemed like it could be a show about how a murder impacts a small town that seemed interesting and then didn’t go anywhere.
Shea: Dorff was really wonderful (old Roland talking to his dogs was one of my favorite scenes) and Scoot McNairy but for the pretty much everyone else, including Mahershala, I couldn’t get past the script. Like the words coming of their mouths, my lord. (I think Dorff had the least egregious lines too.)
Any other feelings or lines/moments/details you want to talk about that didn’t make your review?
Jake: I wanted to say more about Amelia’s character, because she was a really big part of the show, but as much as I thought about it I just don’t know what the point of her was. It felt like the whole book story line was there to help the investigation along which would have been much better achieved by just having the detectives solve the case. She was also given by far the worst dialogue in the show (possibly because she was a writer and Pizzolatto thought he could get away with her saying the profoundest shit that just ended up sounding dumb).
I also think the guy who played the father of the Purcell kids [McNairy] was good.
I thought the last episode was awful. Like, I usually think last episodes shouldn’t have too much of a bearing on the show overall but it made me dislike what came before a lot more.
Shea: I want to come back to Amelia. I also want to come back to the last episode because holy f**king shit. But first, would you watch a fourth season? Would you watch something else by Nic Pizzolatto?
Jake: Depends on the actors. I still think with the right combo of actors and directors this show could work, but Pizzolatto seems like the obvious weak link. He should be aiming for formulaic — one good juicy case and two people investigating — and allow the talent around him to elevate it. Would not seek out anything else he makes, but you never know.
Shea: I would imagine you’re certainly not alone in feeling that way about future seasons. Fair play to Pizzolatto I guess if he can swindle a career of TD remakes. I personally will probably never voluntarily watch his work again. I love these actors, love the genre, but his auteur approach clearly isn’t doing it for me so I don’t see myself ever being drawn back in. When I pick out the things I would have liked to see the show about, it’s just a different show.
Jake: Did you watch the previous seasons/what did you think? Because that colored my viewing a lot.
Shea: I watched the first two seasons. I didn’t love the first as much as everyone or hate the second as much as everyone, and the more I think about it, the more I think I probably did not actually like the first — it was so long ago, I suspect I may have got swept up in the hive mind. I don’t trust my memory.
More than past TDs coloring my experience though, Philbert colored my experience. There have been a number of really, really sharp parodies, riffs and derivations of TD since season 1 that I think drew attention to shortcomings Pizzolatto did not see the need to address for season 3 and that frustrated me. Like the credits alone felt like a parody of itself.
Jake: I’d like a breakdown of what you thought was unoriginal (and why) and what was bonkers bad? I’m not entirely comfortable with the unoriginal tag.
Shea: By unoriginal I mean I don’t feel like I saw a single thing I hadn’t seen before, which is why it was so exhausting to sit through. He was doing nothing new. In terms of aesthetic and tone, he’s copying himself, which ultimately isn’t that big of an issue, but more generally the show is full of stock characters and tropes and the script does nothing to complicate, interrogate or at all do anything interesting with the decision to recreate genre cliches.
I have not muttered “what the f*ck” at my TV that much since Abducted in Plain Sight.
Bonkers bad I would point you first to episode 4. I have not muttered “what the f*ck” at my TV that much since Abducted in Plain Sight. Mostly, again, it’s script problems. I have a lower bar for direction, though the transitions between timelines were often very silly. But yeah. The Vietnam hallucinations, that trailer park scene, the fight sex scene, everything about Woodard, really just the entire 2015 timeline, everything about race and the gay baiting/homophobia. I just have 300 questions about his decisions and they’re all “why.”
And then episode 8 / the finale was bonkers bad in my opinion too. Again just because every scene made me ask aloud, what on earth are these creative decisions? I actually enjoyed the reveal of what happened but I would have enjoyed it more as an episode of the cancelled CBS classic Cold Case. I was also almost hysterically laughing during Ghost Amelia “what if the ending isn’t really the ending” monologue.
About Amelia. More than her book and ghost spirit storyline, I was confused by the decision to center her and Wayne’s relationship as the most important thread of the show when it is such a poorly developed and executed relationship in every way.
What do you think Pizzolatto thinks the show is ”really” about? The more I think about it, the more I think he thinks it’s about Wayne and Amelia’s relationship, it is the only thing that changes over the series and the penultimate moment (lol @ walking into the glowing white light and wtf @ Vietnam as the last note). Wayne and Roland’s relationship doesn’t change in any meaningful way, they don’t grows as individuals. I don’t think he succeeds at centering Wayne and Amelia’s relationship, but I think it’s what he’s going for.
Jake: The reason I asked about the originality thing is that I got the sense the show really was about Wayne and Amelia’s relationship, which is not something I’ve seen before. I thought that was a bad choice, but I thought it was a bad choice because it was executed poorly, not because it was necessarily a bad idea. I think things that are bad almost always seem unoriginal in some way, because there is probably something similar to them that is better and we focus on the ways it fails to live up to that. If The Sopranos was written by Piz it probably would have been dismissed as a terrible Godfather wannabe with a psychiatrist gimmick thrown in. Anyway, I basically agree with that, I just don’t think originality really comes into it.
Honestly possibly the most interesting thing about True Detective at this point is the way perceptions have changed over time. I think the star power and basic competence of season 1 led to these gushing reviews that were then pushed back on and then season 2 revealed maybe there were more problems than people realized and things like Philbert just underline how silly the basic thing is. The thing that I kept coming back to was just how completely and overwhelmingly serious the show is. Like not a note of comedy anywhere at all or even any indication that anyone in the entire world of the show is capable of anything other than brooding depression.
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson was the greatest stroke of casting luck in history.
I feel like watching season 1 again, but my feelings is that [Matthew] McConaughey and [Woody] Harrelson was like the greatest stroke of casting luck in history. They were the perfect actors to make up for Piz many shortcomings as a writer.
McC can pull off the philosophy nonsense on his sheer charisma and Harrelson to me is just such a naturally funny presence that it offsets the seriousness.
Shea: Well, again, it’s TD3’s particular brand of bad. I have watched bad shows that take big original swings and miss wildly but I can respect or enjoy the risk. This was not that. (I would however agree that exploring a crime through the lens of the domestic relationship is new, but I don’t think he achieved that or even made his intentions super clear because there was so much else going on. So, partial credit?)
Super agree about the seriousness and the season 1 casting. Humor would have given the show an element of self-awareness and self-awareness goes very far in my book. There’s a moment after Wayne makes yet another prison rape joke and Roland says something like “huh prison rape’s a real go-to for you lately” and it was the best.
Jake: Haha yes I remember that line it was the only time that I thought maybe they know what’s going on.
But yeah I think we’re agreed that this show was a failure, but I stand by that it wasn’t any more unoriginal than anything else.
Can we talk about the ending? That was as bad a finale as I’ve ever seen.
Shea: “I stand by that it wasn’t any more unoriginal than anything else” Of course it is! But this feels like an argument I’m not going to win without the kind of receipts that would derail this conversation.
Which ending? There were many.
This is the worst relationship in the history of troubled fictional relationships.
Jake: Let’s rank them.
1. Vietnam hahah what.
2. The one where the one-eyed man told them everything that happened after they failed to do literally any police work.
3. The maybe she’s actually alive after all.
4. The bar scene with Wayne and Amelia, literally this is the worst relationship in the history of troubled fictional relationships.
Shea: I would rephrase 3 as “the one where Ghost Amelia told him what really happened after they failed to do literally any police work” and also let’s not forget the transitions between the multiple endings which included ZOOMING INTO HIS EYE and WALKING THROUGH A DOOR OF LIGHT.
Jake: The eye zoom was bad but I must confess I thought some of the other transitions between timeline were kind of cool. But also I can’t remember the specific ones.
I like people looking at cameras because Eddie Murphy does it in Trading Places.
Shea: I’m sure some transitions were good, that feels statistically probable.
Jake: Sunday was quite the day for Mahershala.
Shea: Mahershala is taking a break from acting [to give his wife the opportunity to focus on her career] and I really hope he comes back with a fresh set of eyes for the projects he’s choosing. At least he’s definitely getting an Emmy nom. I also could not stop thinking about how he had to *convince* Piz that an Arkansas detective in the 80s could be black and then Nic took “black detective” and ran off a f**king cliff.
Jake: Yeah, the racism stuff was so badly done. Is there some casting backstory to this?
Shea: That’s the only one I know — that the character was written white and Ali was offered a supporting role (maybe the one-eyed guy?) and he convinced Nic the lead could be black.
I want to wrap this up, but before we do I have a binge/not binge question for you. Did you get into like fan theories or subreddits? That was the one thing that I thought if I wasn’t bingeing, it could in theory have been fun to see people try to solve it in real time.
Jake: I didn’t. I tried to avoid reading other stuff so my review was not impacted by too many other opinions although in hindsight yes that could have made it a lot more fun and is an obvious benefit to not bingeing that bingeing doesn’t allow.
Then again.
Not sure there was any redeeming this show.