Details have been hard to come by leading up to the second season of "True Detective," but things got much clearer this week with the premiere looming in just over a month.
On Friday, HBO released four new posters for the show, as well as a Q&A with series creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto on Medium. In one of the most detailed interviews from someone on the inside, Pizzolatto put some rumors to bed, like the overall occult motif from season one transferring to the new episodes.
"The gothic horror suggested by Louisiana's coastal landscape didn't feel appropriate in this place," he said of the new, more urban Los Angeles setting. "These new landscapes have their own unique voice and their own unsettling qualities. While there's nothing occult in this season, I think there's a disconcerting psychology to this world, and its characters have other kinds of uncanny reality with which to contend."
He echoed that sentiment again when backtracking on a statement he made months ago, before the full context of the season was created, regarding the role "Bad men, hard women and the secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system" will play.
"...There's definitely bad men and hard women, but no secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system," Pizzolatto said. "That was a comment from very early in the process, and something I ended up discarding in favor of closer character work and a more grounded crime story. The complexity of the historical conspiracy first conceived detracted from the characters and their reality, I felt, and those characters are ultimately what have to shape the world and story. So I moved away from that."
Even the character structures in the second season will be different from how detectives Cohle and Marty, the main men from the show's first installment, were created. Pizzolatto made it a point to "build from scratch" for the new characters.
"As the characters multiplied and their individual and group complications grew, a more integrated and linear structure worked best," he said. "And there was the conviction that if we were to do something entirely new, then we shouldn't lean on past conceits, but really build from scratch."
"True Detective" returns to HBO on June 21. Check below for the newest posters, all complete with this season's tagline "We get the world we deserve."
