Time is a flat circle

Continuing my trip up Empire's top 20 TV shows of 2024

#10 :  True Detective: Night Country

HBO’s anthology crime series returned in spectacular fashion with Night Country, which transported us to the cold, endless night of Ennis, Alaska, in a new season created by Mexican writer-director Issa López. Jodie Foster is as brilliant as ever as Liz Danvers, a grouchy, stubborn, somewhat chaotic police chief, tasked with finding out what happened to a whole team of researchers that were discovered dead, frozen in the icy wasteland, with hints at a somewhat supernatural cause. Kali Reis is an excellent foil-slash-teammate as Trooper Evangeline Navarro, who has a personal stake in the case, and confronts her own issues and past as they solve it. With a totally immersive sense of time and place, fascinating central mystery, prescient story threads on Indigenous issues and an ending you won’t see coming, Night Country is True Detective at its very best.

This is another one I've watched because the first season of True Detective was very well done - the next two were somewhat less well received, but this one got great write-ups, so I thought I'd give it another chance!

It's all based around the unexplained deaths of a number of people at a research base - and when I say "unexplained", I'm REALLY not lying.  Chief Of Police Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) try to get to the bottom of it, but there's an awful lot that goes on here that's not in the slightest bit explained so do not come to it expecting to see a real-life police drama.  And that's pretty much all I'm going to tell you except that some reviewers really didn't like the ending, but I thought it was OK - it managed to explain most of the mysteries whilst still leaving enough unexplained that you were left thinking "what does that mean?". The oranges are also an interesting quirk - a possible nod to The Godfather, but they're never really explained.

It is also nicely creepy and features some genuine scares - which would generally put me off, but I found myself quite enjoying it. It's set in Alaska during "the long night" and that's always going to be an atmospheric place to set something and it doesn't let them down here with a lot of the shots being very cinematic with great use of light (or lack thereof).

Jodie is great as you'd expect her to be - she certainly doesn't go for the sympathetic characters and there's a lot not to like about her here. Equally good is Kali Reis - you're more likely to know her from her professional boxing career than her acting career, but she does a really good job here - she's a slightly more sympathetic character, but still quite spiky.

John Hawkes and Finn Bennett are also good as a father/son pair of cops, both of whom aren't quite what they originally seem and Fiona Shaw is obviously nicely quirky - she's becoming a bit of a sign of quality with this being the fourth thing I've written about that she's in (after Colette, Ammonite and Andor, and you can be sure Killing Eve would be on there if I'd started sooner). Isabella Star LaBlanc is also good as Leah, Liz's step-daughter and Christopher Eccleston (our first visit with the man!) does a surprisingly good job with the Alaskan accent.

And that's about all I have to say about it - it may not make a huge amount of sense, but it looks good, is nicely atmospheric and is well acted, so what more could you ask for? If you fancy it, it's on Sky - which is becoming more and more of a rarity these days, mostly due to the sheer volume of competing outlets these days, I guess.

#11 - Just soooo sloooow