Season 3 stubbornly focused on a subplot I couldn’t care less about, a husband and wife’s marital difficulties, with a clunky self-seriousness that the grisly B-movie tropes of Pizzolatto’s “charms” as a writer didn’t need. In the end, the Purcell case was interesting enough to keep our attention on the screen for the better part of eight episodes, but there also was a certain lack of satisfaction, as if this was another confirmation that Pizzolatto’s total and utter control of his mise-en-scene is a major problem. After being fired halfway through production, director Jeremy Saulnier told me in an interview last year that he jokingly felt like Pizzolatto “stabbed him in the face many times” during production. Hollywood hack Daniel Sackheim (“The Glass House” and “The X-Files”) came in to save the day for Pizzolato, which resulted in a visually dull look for this third season, despite its vehemently false insistence to its viewers that it looked fantastic. The primordial, faux-gritty look of the season was shameful and the firing of a maverick like Saulnier equally infuriating. The decision to have three timelines, happening in the ‘80s, ‘90s and today, the latter of which has Wayne suffering from dementia while still trying to crack the unsolved case, resulted in hit and miss sequences. You always had the notion, in the back of your mind, that what was going on in the ‘80s and ‘90s were not as consequential to the overall crux of the story, since we knew the case was never solved and these old AARP fogies are still trying to crack it right now. The overall tension of the story was lost due to this misguided decision to concentrate so heavily on the necessary, but overly expository, flashbacks. Contribute Hire me
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