True Detective: Night Country Star Responds to Nic Pizzolatto's Controversial Posts

True Detective's successful fourth season has drawn frustrating criticism from the show's original creator.

By Charlie Ridgely

True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto has been quick to criticize the newest season of HBO's anthology series. Pizzolatto wrote the first three seasons of True Detective, the latter two of which failed to live up to expectations of the original, both critically and in the ratings. The new installment, True Detective: Night Country, saw Issa López take over as writer and showrunner, earning the most acclaimed reviews of the series since 2014 and True Detective's highest ratings ever. Still, there has been a small group of vocal True Detective viewers who have spend the last six weeks criticizing the new season, and it appears Pizzolatto is among them.

In a series of now-deleted Instagram posts, Pizzolatto shared messages from viewers that referred to Night Country as a "hot mess" that "butchered and misappropriated" the "all time classic dialogue" of True Detective's first season. This has been an ongoing issue for Pizzolatto, who has been replying to comments with negative thoughts about Night Country for several weeks. He told one fan that he "certainly didn't have any input on this story or anything else. Can't blame me." It's worth noting that Pizzolatto is still an executive producer for the series, so he is certainly benefitting from its renewed success.

After these comments started surfacing online following Sunday night's season finale (the second most-watched episode of True Detective), Night Country star Kali Reis took to social media to address Pizzolatto's criticism.

"That's a damn shame," Reis said. "But hey I guess 'if you don't have anything good to share, shit on others' is the new wave."

Reis stars in Night Country alongside Oscar-winning legend Jodie Foster. The duo play two police officers in Ennis, Alaska, who are investigating the murder of an indigenous woman and the mysterious deaths of several remote scientists.

López, who wrote and directed all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country, was also asked about Pizzolatto's comments when they first started surfacing online earlier in the season.

"I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he's entitled to them. That's his prerogative," López shared with Vulture. "I wrote this with profound love for the work he made and love for the people that loved it. And it is a reinvention, and it is different, and it's done with the idea of sitting down around the fire, and [let's] have some fun and have some feelings and have some thoughts. And anybody that wants to join is welcome."  

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