It took five long years, but True Detective is back and looking pretty damn good. HBO’s dark crime anthology returns in January 2024 on Max with a chilling new cast, story, setting, and, most crucially, a new showrunner. Indie filmmaker Issa López is taking the reins from series creator Nic Pizzolatto to spearhead season four, and she already knows she’s got a powerful lead duo for True Detective: Night Country in Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.
“True Detective is male and sweaty. Night Country is cold, dark, and female. I thought we’d remind everyone what we love about the show by doing the absolute opposite,” López told reporters at an event this morning focused on Max’s upcoming content slate. Enter the two female actors: Reis, whom she dubbed as a “crazy talent with the discipline of an athlete because she’s a boxer” and Foster, a.k.a. “one of the best, if not the best actor alive right now,” according to López. Honestly, she makes a great point. López added that she wasn’t ready for the depths Foster brings to the role of a detective in a remote town hunting for a killer. “The places she goes to are insane, and she does it effortlessly. I’ve not seen that in a long time. She’s such a collaborator.”
The episodes follow cops Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Reis) who often clash while working together. They start investigating the mysterious disappearance of eight men from a research station in the fictional, icy town of Ennis, Alaska. The cast also includes Fiona Shaw, Christopher Eccleston, Finn Bennett, John Hawkes, and Isabella Star LaBlanc.
The self-described “crazy Mexican” director also spoke about how getting her start in telenovelas helped in crafting TD. “It taught me the discipline of episodic cliffhangers and characters,” she recalled. “It’s all there in my writer’s DNA.” Her love for TV is why Night Country is personal to her. She went on to praise the medium extremely poetically: “TV comes from an effort to sell soap in boxes, but it’s evolved into more complex narratives. HBO was key in turning it into a more profound art form. It’s now just as complex, if not more complex, than cinema. It’s like creating a perfect movie again and again episodically to tell a single story. There’s a cultural impact of it on our identities. Movies are a beautiful affair you think about later in life. TV shows are relationships you keep coming back to. We saw what happened with Matthew Perry, it affected all of us.” Again, why argue when she’s right?
Speaking specifically about Night Country’s plot, she cited whodunits like Sherlock Holmes and horror films like The Shining. Her biggest inspiration for season four, though, is John Carpenter’s The Thing, calling it “a masterpiece that’s aged well.” It’s not only fiction that led to Night Country; it’s also real-life unexplained events like the crew of a ship going missing or the Dyatlov Pass incident when Russian mountain hikers died under strange circumstances in 1959—mysteries that she’s personally invested in.
However, she admits she didn’t follow a specific storytelling structure. “It’s not my thing, but somehow it came together and it’s magical.” Night Country stands on its own as part of an anthology, but López warns there are light Easter eggs. (Marvel, what hell hath you wrought?). She added: “I called HBO to ask how closely I had to follow the True Detective format, and they are incredible, so they told me, ‘Do whatever you want.’ I do follow the aesthetic of the True Detective world just to say, ‘I see you,’ so it’s a bit connected, but it is its own story.”
True Detective: Night Country releases on Max in January 2024.