True Detective: Night Country Creator Considered Using Multiple Timelines

True Detective: Night Country has a lot in common with the iconic first season of the hit anthology series, including some key references and motifs that directly link the two stories. That said, Night Country does have one massive difference that sets it apart from all three True Detective seasons that came before it. This installment of the True Detective saga is largely told in one period of time, as opposed to spanning decades or telling a story across multiple different timelines.

The story of Night Country follows Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) working a case in the present day, but there’s a couple of major events from their past that influences their rocky relationship. That past was rarely addressed in the first two episodes of the season, but this past Sunday’s episode gave fans a couple of flashbacks that helped to really shape their narrative. We got a glimpse of the last case they worked together, as well as Navarro’s first meeting with Annie K., the woman whose murder six years prior appears to be at the center of the Ennis, Alaska’s current mystery.

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, showrunner/director/writer Issa López talked about the decision to finally reveal a little bit about the past of her lead characters. She also shared that she explored the idea of using multiple timelines, keeping up the tradition of True Detective, but it didn’t quite serve the story.

“I did toy with that idea, that we would see the old crime six years ago,” López explained. “But in the end, I didn’t think it would add anything to the story I was telling, except a lot of headaches with makeup.”

“There was something yummy about not knowing the past, not seeing it and then discovering it slowly,” she added. “What really happened there? What’s the real story?”

López went on to say that they shot the past storyline, but that there have been several different ways the series could go about showing those events.

“I wrote six different versions of [that whole storyline] and of how I reveal what really happened, and we shot it,” López said. “Then in the edit, we discovered that if we show this but don’t show this, and don’t reveal this until the end…really, we were playing so much throughout [production]. There were so many ways to decide how much information you keep and how much information you give. It was a luxury that I was able to have because we stuck to the present. It was the right choice.”

New episodes of True Detective: Night Country debut every Sunday night on HBO and Max.