Big expectations, little promise
The magic Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson captured in New Orleans and Texas for season one of True Detective was nothing short of amazing. However, the pair left the show – due to the series transitioning to another story needing to be told within its universe.
With HBO tapping Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn for its sophomore season last year, viewers like ourselves were initially very intrigued for what to expect.
Unfortunately, those expectations were failed, with the second season generating a poor audience reaction and viewers having no sense of what exactly the hell happened.
HBO programming president Michael Lombardo, spoke with Southern California Public Radio earlier to discuss how the series went from having five Emmy Awards to zero.
Contrary to popular belief, he stated that Nic Pizzolatto wasn’t to blame for the show’s decline – citing short deadlines to create organic scripts was the real blame on HBO themselves.
When a show doesn’t work, how do you figure out what went wrong? I’m going to talk about a specific show, “True Detective.” The first season was extraordinary television. The second season — and you may disagree with me — but a lot of people think it was an inferior version of the first season. What are the lessons you take away?
I’ll tell you something. Our biggest failures — and I don’t know if I would consider “True Detective 2” — but when we tell somebody to hit an air date as opposed to allowing the writing to find its own natural resting place, when it’s ready, when it’s baked — we’ve failed. And I think in this particular case, the first season of “True Detective” was something that Nic Pizzolatto had been thinking about, gestating, for a long period of time. He’s a soulful writer. I think what we did was go, “Great.” And I take the blame. I became too much of a network executive at that point. We had huge success. “Gee, I’d love to repeat that next year.”
Well, you know what? I set him up. To deliver, in a very short time frame, something that became very challenging to deliver. That’s not what that show is. He had to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Find his muse. And so I think that’s what I learned from it. Don’t do that anymore.
And I’d love to have the enviable certainty of knowing what my next year looks like. I could pencil things in. But I’m not going to start betting on them until the scripts are done.
Read more of interview with Michael Lombardo at SCPR.org’s website.
How Did You Like “True Detective” Season 2?