“In its first season, True Detective showed us a Louisiana that rarely makes it into TV shows or movies: the deteriorating back woods plantations, the Christian universities, the meth labs, the dull suburbs. Writer Nic Pizzolatto was taking us on a noir tour of his home state – and now he’s in ours.”
So begins the inaugural episode of Welcome to Vinci, a new podcast from Southern California Public Radio. It’s the insider’s guide to the real life stories and California settings featured on the new season of HBO’s True Detective – and when it comes to understanding that show, we can use all the help we can get.
Why you should listen
“Did you see that quote from Nic Pizzolatto saying he was going to unveil the dark history of the United States’ transportation system in Los Angeles? That made me interested in this season,” said Kevin Ferguson, the host of Welcome to Vinci.
It was no surprise that it caught Ferguson’s attention, a native son of Los Angeles County and producer at SCPR’s weekend show Off Ramp, he, like most Angelenos, tends to spend a lot of time in traffic. While True Detective has yet to go deep into the transportation system, Pizzolatto has given viewers a crash course in what Ferguson calls “the noirish dark underbelly of LA”.
“The idea of a show doing a thorough and sincere look at Los Angeles was pretty interesting. The city gets featured a lot on the small and big screen, but it’s usually not done in a way with a lot of attention to the history of the place,” said Ferguson.
“There’s a lot of stuff we can discover about the city using True Detective as a jumping-off point.”
Each week, sometimes more frequently, Ferguson uses the HBO show to explore LA and provide real world context to fans of the show, and he has a lot of material to work with. This season of True Detective is set in the city of Vinci, which is based on the very real town of Vernon, California, one of 88 incorporated cities inside the boundaries of LA County.
“I’m sure very few people outside the city of Los Angeles had ever heard of the city of Vernon,” said Ferguson. “I’m sure some people in Los Angeles haven’t heard of it.” Yet LA residents – and those who listen to Welcome to Vinci now know that the two cities, the real Vernon and the fake Vinci, are both just minutes away from downtown Los Angeles. Further proof that the two cities are the same came just minutes into the first episode of the new season when a giant water tower emblazoned with the words “City of Vinci” filled the screen. In real life, this water tower looms over the Los Angeles River with “City of Vernon” scrawled across it. It’s become the most recognizable landmark of the town who chose as their motto the delightfully evocative phrase: “Exclusively Industrial.”
“I was pleasantly surprised to see a city like that made the focus of a TV show, especially because he has done a thoroughly researched job in portraying the city accurately,” said Ferguson.
For example, part of this season’s plot is ripped from the Vernon headlines. “Around 2012, Vernon’s city administrator Eric Fresch was discovered dead in a state park up in the Bay Area,” explained Ferguson. Anyone who tuned into True Detective’s first episode will recognize that scenario. After Fresch’s death made the news, the newsmakers started paying close attention to the town, which boasts only about 100 residents, many of whom are well-paid employees of the city. “The last four years we’ve been paying pretty close attention to the goings-on in these smaller cities where stuff is pretty opaque,” said Ferguson, “and things are just now coming to light that have been going on for years.”
It’s exactly this kind of insider knowledge that makes Welcome to Vinci such a compelling listen – whether you watch True Detective or not. While having a local’s take on the show is useful, having a local team of news reporters as guides is invaluable. In addition to Ferguson’s local cred and the deep institutional knowledge of SCPR, Ferguson brings in guests like Tom Carroll, who runs a popular YouTube series called Tom Explores Los Angeles to discuss the history of cops in the city, and experts like a ballistics specialist and a trauma surgeon to discuss whether or not someone [no spoilers] could survive a close-range shotgun blast to the chest.
“We’re not trying to replicate what you see on Reddit with speculation about literature references,” explained Ferguson. “I saw a thread on Reddit where they were trying to figure out whether Pizzolatto blacked out one of the star’s in Orion’s Belt. We’re not trying to do that. We’re not interested in questions like ‘What is the meaning of the book on Detective Ray Velcoro’s table?’ We’re trying to give context to the show’s setting and doing it with high production values, good news judgment, and without snark.”
Where to Start: The podcast follows along with the show, so it’s best to start at the beginning. What the F is Vinci? and Vinci Plays Itself.
You can subscribe to Welcome to Vinci on iTunes or Stitcher.
