To punish myself for living an imperfect life, I sometimes watch a really terrible TV series right to the very end, just to make sure I am right about it (I always am). This is how I ended up watching the second series of True Detective, which is dreadful in every possible way: Vince Vaughn is horribly miscast; it’s filmed with all the style of a filler episode of CSI; the central mysterious murder is impossible to care about; and, crucially, it seems to have been written and made and acted in by people who have never consumed any art beyond a mid-game mission from GTA V. Colin Farrell is the only one doing any acting, and even then it’s to such a non-end that I am retroactively rescinding a star from my personal review of The Banshees of Inisherin for his involvement in it.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about second-season syndrome as a result, and how common it used to be. Back in 2015, when True Detective was ruining the legacy of its first season with the doomed second, it was fairly common to see TV shows not know how to start again after neatly finishing up their first series and getting more lauded than expected. It makes sense: when you’re creating a 10-episode run of TV, you truly don’t know if it’s going to get picked up again, so you try to write a story freestanding enough to make sense if it gets cancelled but with enough loose ends to pick up again should it not be (if you closely watch the early seasons, they kept doing this with Breaking Bad). Then you get the phone call from HBO saying: “We’ve seen the audience figures and guess what – we now love it!” and you realise you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Follow-up problems happen with albums, they happen with books. Sometimes you just run out of road.
