True Detective: Night Country’s finale ended with season-high ratings, according to Variety: 3.2 million viewers tuned in across HBO and its streaming service, Max. That capped off a viewership of about 12.7 million across all episodes, an all-time high for the franchise. As Variety notes, this new generation of True Detective has the benefit of new ways to watch (Max), but it’s undeniable that audiences were plugged in and often enjoying the show’s new direction… except for the series’ creator, Nic Pizzolatto.
According to screenshots saved to Twitter/X, Pizzolatto apparently reposted fan messages on Instagram that railed against the way True Detective’s fourth season “butchered and misappropriated” the first season’s “all time classic dialogue,” describing the season as a “hot mess” and criticizing the finale’s reveal as “self righteous vigilantism.”
Pizzolatto’s social media activity did not go unnoticed by fans—or by the True Detective cast. When one Twitter user observed that the creator was “posting other people’s stories about how Issa López ruined the franchise like an absolutely enormous baby,” fourth season star Kali Reis retweeted it with her own message. “That’s a damn shame…but hey I guess ‘if you don’t have anything good to share, shit on others’ is the new wave,” she wrote with a shrug emoji.
The sad thing is that Reis told The A.V. Club that she was a “huge fan” of Pizzolatto’s True Detective: “Like everyone else, I drooled over season one. It’s one of the best TV shows I’ve seen,” she said. “The second season wasn’t my favorite, but it’s because it was so different from the first, which set a high bar. But I’ve still seen it. And I loved Mahershala Ali in the third season. I know everybody is going to compare season four to the first one, but there are [no comparisons], even if there are some similarities.”
Fourth-season showrunner Issa López was diplomatic in her response to the shade Pizzolatto was throwing earlier this month. “I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them. That’s his prerogative,” she told Vulture. “I wrote this with profound love for the work he made and love for the people that loved it. And it is a reinvention, and it is different, and it’s done with the idea of sitting down around the fire, and [let’s] have some fun and have some feelings and have some thoughts. And anybody that wants to join is welcome.”
The fact that Pizzolatto didn’t feel welcome to join the new True Detective might be part of the problem: he was teasing a pitch for the fourth season back in 2019, but he eventually left HBO for FX (and in 2021, it was reported he was negotiating an earlier exit from the FX deal). But Pizzolatto (alongside first season stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) is still listed as an executive producer on True Detective, so he’s profiting off of the new show even though he’s not involved. Clearly, he didn’t extend the same spirit of welcome to López to play in the sandbox he created; he called the connections the new season made to the first “so stupid.”
Which is also sad, since López described those references as “love letters to the original series” in an interview with The A.V. Club. “Every time that it felt organic, I connected them, just to create a common universe—to say, ‘It is the same place,’” she explained later to Variety. “It is not a central part of the story, but it’s nice to know that there is a certain connective tissue between those.” Unfortunately, that connective tissue isn’t something everyone can appreciate.