Here's Exactly Who's To Blame For The Lackluster TRUE DETECTIVE Season 2

If you've been following along with HBO's True Detective, it's very likely you noticed a tremendous drop in quality from the show's outstanding first season to its crushingly disappointing second season. In the last piece for this site that I wrote about the show, the network, who was disappointed by the reaction to the second season, presented series creator/showrunner (and sole writer) Nic Pizzolatto with a few options about how to move forward for a potential third season: he could bring on a writing staff, have a new showrunner come in, or allow Pizzolatto to write the entire thing himself again. Though it wasn't clear at the time, I guessed that that last option would include a longer time between seasons to give the writer more time to craft a new story, and now it appears that suspicion holds true.

In an interview with The Frame (via Uproxx), president of programming Michael Lombardo revealed that actually he is the one to blame when it comes to how the second season turned out:

I’ll tell you something. Our biggest failures — and I don’t know if I would consider “True Detective 2” — but when we tell somebody to hit an air date as opposed to allowing the writing to find its own natural resting place, when it’s ready, when it’s baked — we’ve failed. And I think in this particular case, the first season of “True Detective” was something that Nic Pizzolatto had been thinking about, gestating, for a long period of time. He’s a soulful writer. I think what we did was go, “Great.” And I take the blame. I became too much of a network executive at that point. We had huge success. “Gee, I’d love to repeat that next year.”

Well, you know what? I set him up. To deliver, in a very short time frame, something that became very challenging to deliver. That’s not what that show is. He had to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Find his muse. And so I think that’s what I learned from it. Don’t do that anymore.

And I’d love to have the enviable certainty of knowing what my next year looks like. I could pencil things in. But I’m not going to start betting on them until the scripts are done.

That's a rare admission of guilt from a network executive, and it's nice to hear that he's learned from the mistake of trying to force creatives to work to a release date instead of letting the work form more naturally. Movie studio executives should probably take note here — this is a big part of the reason most blockbuster movies don't turn out great. Talented filmmakers can sometimes overcome challenges and make films better than they have any right to be when they're up against insanely tight deadlines (see: The Force Awakens), but more often than not, if the script isn't ready to go but filming begins anyway, it's not going to be successful on a story or character level.