The first trailer for the long-awaited third season of HBO’s True Detective has been unveiled.
Set to premiere in January 2019, the third season of Nic Pizzolatto’s crime anthology series stars Academy Award-winner Mahershala Ali as an Arkansas state police detective investigating a grisly crime in the Ozarks over a period of decades.
The trailer confirms this time-skipping element, with Ali’s character seen across a number of different time periods. Visually it resembles the murky, moody aesthetic of the show’s first season, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as detectives investigating a murder in a limpid, dishevelled Louisiana.
While that season received plaudits from critics and viewers alike, True Detective’s second season, which was set in California’s criminal underworld and starred Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn, proved more divisive, appearing in a number of “worst TV series of the year” lists when it debuted in 2015. The season’s failure was blamed in part on a rushed script, which may explain the protracted production this time around.
True Detective’s third season, which also stars Carmen Ejogo and Stephen Dorff, has not been without its production troubles ,with director Jeremy Saulnier departing the project earlier than planned due to what HBO described as “scheduling conflicts”. Sources at Variety suggested that the Green Room film-maker and Pizzolatto had “differences of opinion” during filming.
True Detective season three will air on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK.
