The dark and brooding smash hit True Detective was one of the hottest shows on the planet last year, and a big part of Matthew McConaughey’s career resurgence. For the show’s highly-anticipated second season, series creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto recently took to the culture site Medium for a Q&A session with an interviewer listed only as “HBO,” in which he dished about what we can expect for True Detective’s second take.
One of the most interesting parts of Pizzolatto’s unique series is the fact that each season of the serial will tell an entirely different story. The story this time around follows a police officer and military veteran (Taylor Kitsch) who discovers a crime which brings around two detectives (Rachel McAdams and Colin Ferrell), with a career criminal and entrepreneur (Vince Vaughn) also playing a part.
A common question that fans have asked of Pizzolatto was if the two seasons, which sport entirely different casts, will have anything at all to do with one another. Unfortunately, we can stop hoping to see McConaughey’s Rust Cohle is Season 2. “There’s no relationship between the stories or characters, which was the result of fully committing to something new,” Pizzolatto said. He went on to state that the seasons will instead have a “close bond of sensibility and vision, a similar soul,” so expect much of the same themes and moral ambiguity that appeared in the first season in round two.
Turning from a question on everyone’s minds to less obvious points, Pizzolatto went into deeper insights about plot direction, specifically addressing the new season’s initial premise about the secret occult history of the US transportation system, which was scratched as a part of the new story. “That was a comment from very early in the process,” Pizzolatto explains, “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.”
Pizzolatto also answered questions regarding whether or not the Gothic horror sensibilities of the first season will carry over (not really), who wrote the music in the first trailer (T-Bone Burnett), and if it was a conscience choice to remove the separate timelines and two-partner dynamic of season one (“a more integrated and linear structure worked best”).
If you’d like to read the Nick Pizzolatto interview in its entirety, you can check it out on Medium. True Detective season 2 debuts on June 21.
