True Detective returns with lighter touch on the show’s gritty themes

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Jodie Foster stars in True Detective.The Associated Press

True Detective: Night Country, a reboot of HBO’s crime anthology series with Jodie Foster taking the lead on a frigidly cold case, begins as the sun sets outside a remote northern Alaska town for a long month of night.

In the first of many spooky events set off by the dying of the light, a herd of deer run from a stunned Iñupiaq hunter and leap to their deaths like lemmings.

For many viewers, the True Detective brand itself – noir with hints of horror – took a similar long jump off a cliff years ago.

The first Louisiana-set instalment, an idea for a film that creator Nic Pizzolatto artfully stretched into a series starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, kept HBO subscribers very well-hydrated in 2014, trading Yellow King theories around the water cooler.

But a second California-set season with Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams didn’t tick all the boxes for critics or audiences – and, though a third Ozarks-immersed one starring Mahershala Ali produced a modest bounceback in acclaim, the ratings didn’t follow.

So, Pizzolatto’s taken a long walk in the snow and a new showrunner and director has skied on for this season “based on” True Detective per the opening credits: Issa López, a Mexican filmmaker who previously tackled the intersection of crime and horror in 2017′s Tigers Are Not Afraid. Rather than shift the series further south, she’s relocated it to the coldest corner of the United States, the central mystery involving the disappearance of a group of men from an Arctic research station.

López, naturally, brings a stronger female perspective to a show that went through a misogyny postmortem in the media, because of its parade of sex workers and long-suffering wives. But it’s far from the polar opposite.

While the fourth season’s lead detectives are both women, they hew to the tried-and-True formula of unlikely on-again/off-again partners in crime-solving.

Double Oscar winner Foster’s grizzled, but somewhat goofy, white police chief Liz Danvers is in semi-comic Harrelson mode, first appearing searching through all the pockets of her parka for glasses; all she needed to say was “just one more thing” for it to be a full-on Columbo impression – though curse words and PTSD make her cop properly cable.

Kali Reis’s state trooper Evangeline Navarro – the character is Iñupiaq and Dominican American; the actor of Wampanoag and Cape Verdean descent – is cut more from McConaughey’s cloth performance-wise, dry as dry ice delivery.

With her blizzard-force intensity, this boxer-only-recently-turned-actor punches above the weight on her acting résumé and emotionally anchors a series that might otherwise have felt like scattered flurries.

Navarro certainly has more than enough backstory, with traumas including a tour of duty overseas, a dad who left her with a healthy disgust for toxic masculinity, and a sister who might be following her mother down the road to mental-health crisis. (Though, perhaps, the ghosts she and her sister see are real.)

The case that reunites her with Danvers after a long-ago falling out is the vanishing of researchers digging deep into the ice core – shades of The Thing, and one of best-remembered stand-alone episodes from The X-Files.

Navarro wants in after a body part found at the crime scene suggests a connection to an unsolved brutal murder she obsesses over, that of an Iñupiaq activist who was a thorn in the side of the local mining company – which employs half the fictional town of Ennis, and pollutes the water for all.

Back to the shift in gaze that López brings: The very first episode of the original True Detective opened with the discovery of the body of a female sex worker, tortured then suggestively posed as part of a ritual (the notorious spiral carved into her comes back in this series, but thankfully not the accompanying pedophile cult); the cameras seemed to ogle that initial crime scene in a way that was almost as disturbing as the murder itself.

True Detective: Night Country’s first episode, by contrast, ends with the discovery of a mass of male bodies all frozen together – it’s like the cover of a horror comic, gruesome, yet, again, goofy. The humour only increases as this corpsicle with its protruding phalluses is taken to defrost in an unlikely location.

In general, López’s version attacks the franchise with a lighter touch – with a march of men who can be almost sitcom sweet, such as Eddie (the charming Joel D. Montgrand, an on-the-rise Cree actor from Canada), a lover of Navarro’s who would rather be her partner and who has a SpongeBob toothbrush. But even the men with murkier motives have a funny, fragile side to their masculinity – such as regional chief Ted (Christopher Eccleston, erstwhile Dr. Who) who bleaches his teeth at night. (Proper dental hygiene vs. cosmetic treatment – a surprise theme.)

With a “welcome to the end of the world” sign seen entering Ennis, and sight gags galore, this True Detective can teeter on Northern Exposure territory – and the depiction of a shadowy corporation and the Indigenous-led local protests against it has a phoned-in flatness.

But the six episodes skate by on López’s knack for Northern noir – cars always threatening to slip off roads into a snowbank, chilly claustrophobic ice caves, terrifying glimpses of the dark, subconscious world just under the fragile frozen surface of the sea. It’s good winter watching, not escapism set in sunnier climes, but a show that makes you happy to be in the relative warmth of your own.

If you like your detective stories grittier and big city-er, with a past Dr. Who speaking in his own deliciously indecipherable Scottish accent (thank you, captions), Criminal Record on Apple TV+ from creator Paul Rutman is a ripping good thriller that also attempts to grapple with realities around race and policing in London.

Detective Sergeant June Lenker (Cush Jumbo, from The Good Fight) gets an emergency call from a woman who claims a man is threatening to kill her with the same knife he killed someone else a decade ago. The only problem: A Black man is already doing time for that murder.

This brings Lenker, who is Black, too, into the orbit of a white detective chief inspector named Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It as well as Doctor Who) who led the investigation into Mathis many years ago, but brushes off the idea that he collared the wrong guy – dropping “a poor man’s O.J.” comment that sets off Lenker’s spidey sense.

Lenker is, of course, undeterred by all the bureaucratic and personal blocks put in her way as she fights to find out the truth against a ticking clock. Hegarty, meanwhile, lurks on the sidelines – his side hustles and visits to old pals thickening the plot.

There may be a twist or two too many, but the acting is ace. Capaldi vibrates with vulnerability, constantly resurfacing hope he might turn out to be a good cop, while Jumbo forges a deep emotional connection with viewers, making the eight-episode series, surprisingly, as wrenching as it is riveting.

Jumbo’s just another one of those hugely talented British actors who hones her dramatic chops by fitting in Shakespeare in between television gigs. In fact, she’s currently on stage acting opposite another Dr. Who on the West End – playing Lady Macbeth to David Tennant’s Macbeth. It’s a veritable who’s Who right now for murder and mayhem on stage and screen.

True Detective: Night Country airs on HBO and is available on Crave Sundays at 9 p.m. The first two episodes of Criminal Record are now available on Apple TV+, with new ones uploading each Wednesday.