True Detective: Night Country Premiere Event

FilmMagic for HBO
Time and time again, it seems, audiences are fed rotten tomatoes and told that they’re fresh. Just in recent memory we have:

 

Star Wars series The Acolyte has a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics, but audiences gave it an 18%.
Lord Of The Rings prequel series The Rings Of Power boasts an 84% for its second season with critics, but only 58% with audiences.
And somehow, True Detective: Night Country has a 93% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, while just 56% of audiences enjoyed the series.

 

Frankly, the audience scores for both Rings of Power and Night Country are shockingly high as far as I’m concerned. The Acolyte is no worse than either of these shows, and I’d expect both to have much lower ratings. But that’s not the real issue. The real issue is how lauded these shows (and many others) are by critics. And beyond that, we have award shows falling all over themselves to pass out nominations for stuff that’s popular with the chattering class but hardly deserving of awards.

Thus we have Night Country nominated for 19 Emmys this year. While other shows, like FX’s Shogun, have more (Shogun was nominated for a total of 25) 19 makes Night Country the most-nominated limited/anthology series this year. The shows up for Outstanding Limited Or Anthology Series include Baby Reindeer, Fargo, Ripley and Lessons In Chemistry. Of these, I’ve seen all by that last one, and each is better than Night Country. If I had to pick one it would be Baby Reindeer without a moment’s hesitation, followed by Ripley. Night Country looks like amateur hour compared to these shows. I was fairly critical of Fargo’s fifth season, but it’s still a far better written and produced series.

Night Country was laughably bad. Cringey dialogue, a murder investigation that barely included any actual detective work, tons of awkward Easter Eggs for the original season of True Detective, unlikeable characters, a plethora of “noble savage” tropes and a truly ridiculous ending all made this show a crushing disappointment for fans of True Detective. To make matters worse, its creator—Issa López—has now been entrusted with the entire franchise. True Detective’s actual creator, Nic Pizzolatto, has been cast aside.

I won’t list all 19 nominations the show received here, but you can check them out on the Emmy Awards website. They include sound mixing (which was fine) and visual effects (for the first episode, which had some truly awful visual effects) and “Outstanding Writing” which is truly hilarious and plenty more. If this show wins for best Limited Series or Best Writing we will know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Emmys is a joke.

The only Emmy this show deserves is Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for John Hawkes’ song ‘No Use’ which was excellent. Unfortunately for Night Country, that award has already gone to Only Murders In The Building for ‘Which Of The Pickwick Triplets Did It?’ which was also fantastic.

Of course, I wrote a very similar post just over a year ago about the 2023 Emmys which only gave Better Call Saul 7 nominations, had Andor out-nominated by Season 3 of The Mandalorian and completely snubbed Reservation Dogs, one of the best comedy series out there and a far better and more honest portrayal of indigenous Americans than Night Country.

Can you imagine giving Night Country more nominations than Better Call Saul, Andor and Reservation Dogs combined? Giving it 8 more nominations than Baby Reindeer? What a joke.

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.