True Detective Season 2: 5 Awesome Moments (And 5 That Sucked)

Most of the praise for season one left out Pizzolatto's writing, instead manifesting itself as ringing endorsements for the show's aesthetic, music and acting. But Pizzolatto, a fiction writer by trade, filled the first season with enough quasi-philosophy and memorable one-liners ('time is a flat circle'; 'I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution') to satisfy most. 

And while his dialogue sometimes wavered into the absurd, for the most part it was tight, even touching greatness in its best moments. (I still get a chill when I think of Rust Cohle's simple but stunning line, played over the first sighting of Reggie La Deux in that gas-mask, in Rust's unmistakable drawl: 'And like a lot of dreams, there's a monster at the end of it.')

But season two's writing is plain bad. Off the top of my head I can think of only one truly memorable line, when Ray tells his son's bully what he'll do to his father—in an expletive-ridden rant I won't even attempt to recreate here—in the first episode. Besides that, Pizzolatto strives for meaningful lines but ends up with the likes of 'blue balls in your heart', or 'don't do anything when you're hungry, not even eat'. Add to the glob upon glob of chunky exposition, and you get a writer bereft of the brilliance he so often showed last time around.