After a chaotic second season and an extended hiatus, True Detective is returning to HBO, with a story of “macabre crime” set in Northwest Arkansas.
In a news release Friday, the studio disclosed little about the show’s latest storyline, but it isn’t difficult to predict the tone. Nic Pizzolatto — who wrote the majority of the new season and graduated from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in 2005 — favors tales of small-town corruption and violent crime.
“I’m tremendously thrilled to be working with artists at the level of Mahershala [Ali] and Jeremy [Saulnier],” Pizzolatto said in the release. “I hope the material can do justice to their talents, and we’re all very excited to tell this story.”
Pizzolatto’s latest protagonist is a detective for the Arkansas State Police who will be played by Oscar-winner Ali.
The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism is thinking of the new season as an “opportunity to show the beauty of the Ozarks.”
But in New Orleans Plantation Country, where the first season was set, communications director Jo Banner says the major sites on the area's True Detective tour guide — a gas station, a sugarcane field, an oak tree — aren't much.
“They used everything but what people wanted to see,” she said.
Right beside the oak tree where an elderly woman was shot to death on the show, there’s a perfectly good plantation home, one that attracts normal tourists from all over. The True Detective filming crew wasn’t interested, Banner said. Instead, the crew took photos of every oak tree on the property, searching for that perfect one.
She can’t understand it, but she’s happy to have the tourists. And the prospect of an Arkansas-to-Louisiana True Detective tour, that’s something she can work with, she said.
In Arkansas, state police spokesman Liz Chapman said True Detective has yet to make any requests of the agency, though it would need to before using police uniforms or patrol cars.
She noted that the show isn’t the first to turn to the agency for inspiration. Mud, written and directed by Arkansas native Jeff Nichols in 2012, featured real officers and patrol cars. It got all the details right, but Chapman said that’s the exception.
Most films don’t bother. Watching the trailer for American Made, featuring Tom Cruise and scheduled for a September release, she can’t help but note that the Arkansas State Police officers have the wrong belt and patch.
“It’s like nurses watching Grey’s Anatomy,” she said. “I just can’t do it.”