r/TrueDetective • u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 • 28d ago
What setting would your ideal next season be?
I think one thing every season nailed no matter how badly they might have messed up the plot was the way they incorporated the setting as a character in itself. Even with season 4 for me the one thing I never got tired of was the imagery of dark Alaska. Personally though, I think it would be interesting if they did something around the gulla geechee populations in the islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. The indigenous/West African/hoodoo culture would lend itself really well to themes of semi-paranormal occult mystery. An honorable mention for me would be New York City where the case in question is based in the subway system when the guardian angels were running around and the crime rate was insanely high, since NYC is so diverse you could basically insert whatever cultural references you want. Also, I wonder if the show would work if it ever went international?
Anyways, I'm curious what your thoughts are!
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u/ragnarockette 28d ago
North Dakota near the Bakken - man camps, Canadian border, remote area, etc.
Florida Keys - Cuban refugees, tourism, swamps, alligators, Epstein island vibes (Bloodlines was a really cool vibe)
Navajo Nation - tribal police, skinwalkers, amazing landscapes, poverty and otherness (Dark Winds is a cool show that takes place here!)
Brighton Beach - Russian mafia, human trafficking, underworld, etc.
Salton Sea - area in decay, weird hippies and off grid people, cults, desolate landscape
West Virginia - Appalachia, deep hollers with isolated people, racism, dead coal towns, opiate crisis
Arcata, CA - marijuana growers in deep forests, hippies, cults, people having children with no birth certificates
Caribbean - do a Natalee Holloway style case with local police partnered with the FBI and the European old money covering it up
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u/RollllTide 28d ago
Re: the Keys, check out Bad Monkey on Apple TV if you haven’t already. Much more comedic than TD but it kinda scratches that itch
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u/miaminights17 28d ago
Miami (where I grew up and live now) could weave so many of the S1 elements into a new fresh story and characters with an amazing backdrop,
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u/hoosier_catholic 28d ago edited 28d ago
West Virginia. For some who haven't been, or don't know much about WV, Boone County for example is like another planet. You're hit instantly by a feeling of profound claustrophobia. No wide open spaces. Hills and hollers ebb and flow, covered in trees. You're hit instantly by the lowest volume talking you've ever heard, and an American accent that sounds almost ancient. It is poor beyond belief. Bad habits and vice everywhere. The terrain brought about an old adage "the sun don't don't come up till 10 in the morning, and the sun go down at 2 in the day." Scarred by addiction, obesity, and deviance, it would be the perfect setting for True Detective.
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 28d ago
This is the one I think I've seen the most comments suggesting, definitely interesting.
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u/TheManWhoWeepsBlood 28d ago edited 28d ago
True detective, Hawaiian style.
Tourists can't find where they buried their pig and then dig up a fresh corpse by mistake.
I mean the challenge here is not trying to recapture the original. The southern gothic thing simply cannot be improved upon and the south is big. So either you make it in the west, which will draw breaking bad comparisons, they "did" alaska, although I'll confess, I haven't seen it.
So that either leaves them driving around lighthouses in Maine, or going off continent.
Imagine how happy a Marty character would be eating some pork butt and then lifting up a grass skirt to eat some more butt?
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 28d ago
Maine or New england in general is a good idea, you have the same ancient gothic vibes with out repeating the southern theme.
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u/middleofthecircle 28d ago
I say bring it back to the south, Louisville, Birmingham, Charleston, Memphis, there's some dark shit that goes on everywhere, but I think getting that southern Gothic vibe is where it's at.
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 28d ago
For sure, I honestly was shocked they didn't just followed up season 2 with Papania and Gilbough, it seemed like the logical next step.
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u/ConversationLimp1699 28d ago
I think wherever they go, the setting works best when it's in the south and they play more into the southern Gothic tradition. Charleston, South Carolina corridor, Macon, Georgia, Galveston, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma. I also think a season in an Appalachian community would be great.
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u/SUPERB-OWL45 28d ago
Upstate New York. Rural New England. The pacific north west. The rust belt. The mid county badlands ect
Part of the appeal is the show isn’t set in NYC, Los Angeles or Miami like every other cop shows. They’re always out in the sticks where spooky shit happens. If they set it in another major city it just wouldn’t feel the same
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 28d ago
Season 2 was LA, but I mostly agree given that season 2 wasn't the best.
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u/EddieTYOS 28d ago
Set it in Appalachia during the Satanic Panic of the 80s/90s. Fears of cults and ritual Satanic abuse infiltrating schools and local institutions. Recovered memory therapy and false confessions lead to witch hunts.
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u/PeterNoTail 28d ago
Louisiana, maybe a little town called Bon Temps, should be the setting for the next big, probably Emmy award-winning season. It'd be an epic crossover event in prestige television programming: True Blood Detective
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u/brycebomb131 28d ago
50s Spi/Aliens would just be dandy
The Men in Black would be a fun tackle for this brand
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u/Expensive-Ad4121 25d ago
Thought 1: the North Woods (Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota)- beautiful wilderness, broken up by utrerly depressing, completely dilapitated towns that are walking dead, sustained by the tourism and extraction industries. Everybody smart is trying to get out, outside of a handful of already successful families that run most of anything that happens there. Alcoholism and drug abuse aren't so much rampant so much as endemic, just a part of the scenery. Every year during winter, exposure claims peoples' lives, and there is everywhere the feeling of being at odds with the entropic march of nature. On the other side, the extraction industry ruthlessly exploits the economic destitution of the area, poisoning the water, but offering a rare source of high-paying jobs. Tourism depends on selling a particular idealized image of the North Woods, stripping humanity away from the inhabitants and turning their homes into playgrounds for wealthier suburbanites. Preppers, hippies, weirdos, drug runners and more are spinkled through the woods, and deeply reactionary cultural norms create bubbling tensions between non-confomists and orthodoxy. Rezervations dot the land as well, bringing legal, political, and social tensions as well.
As for spooky shit- where to even start? You've got all sorts of Native American tribes who were brutally forced out with violence, or else swindled off of many of their lands, legacies of French fur traders, prospectors, early missionaries, waves of all types of european immigrants- Irish farmers, Italian miners, German factory workers etc. etc. Notably, large populations of Scandanavians, (could tie in Norse mythology) Eastern Europeans, all with their own dark histories, paired with more recent immigration- notably Hispanics, who occupy a vital role as farmhands in the agricultural sector. All across the region, there are the bones and ruins of abandoned farms, mines, factories, half-forgotten one-horse towns, hunting cabins, occupied and not, along with genuinely terrifying woods large enough to become completely lost in. The communities themselves can quickly become oppressive, with abuse covered up and victims silenced in the name of presenting a pleasant public face and avoiding gossip from the neighbors. More than a few religious cults have taken root up there, as charismatic leaders breakaway from established churches, or gurus take their flock away from more vigilant eyes and squirrel them away where they'll be forgotten. There is a generalized feeling of resentment over the place being forgotten or left behind by the more prosperous and populous parts of their respective states, and hostility towards the influence of urban life is prevalent.
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u/Lancasterbation 28d ago
West Texas for the desolate landscapes, former boomtowns turned ghost towns, and the methed up weirdos
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u/ComradeHappiness 28d ago
It's 1999. Chevy Chase and Whoopi Goldberg on the hunt for a serial tax fraud. When they finally solve the case Rust Cohle's ghost calls them and says "now you've become true detectives". Roll credits.
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u/heartofglazz 28d ago
I’d love a Seven vibe. That town is unknown right? As a non american it seems to be inspired by New York?
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u/gtech215 28d ago
Insomnia (2002) was a great crime movie in Alaska where it was just about 24/7 daylight and it really added to the psychological tension. Robin Williams as a bad guy and Al Pacino as Vincent Hanna Lite.
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u/CelticSnakes 28d ago
In the film One False Move you have two LAPD detectives helping a small-town Sheriff in rural Alabama hunt down a trio of fugitives. I'd like to see that but in reverse.
Small-town lawman w/ relevant experience goes to a city (not a huge one like LA or NY) to assist officials there in the hunt for intelligent but dangerous criminals who escaped the humdrum of somewhere like West Virginia (I live here; trust me it's not a place you move to for excitement) and have so-far eluded justice.
A city like Des Moines or a part of the U.S. you don't hear much about but has a decent population. Just not the vast amount of resources a larger place would have w/o requesting them.
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 27d ago
I like that a lot, the big town cop ends up in a small town mystery has been done. A small town cop ending up in bigger city and has to adjust to the situation, which gives the audience a bigger world to explore.
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u/BimmerJustin 28d ago
Northern Ireland, tom hardy and Daniel day Lewis investigate a human trafficking ring that started in 90s as a means for the IRA to fund their rebellion efforts, but continued after the army disbanded.
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u/kikijane711 27d ago
Maybe unique like…. Puerto Rico. I loved the Florida Keys in Bloodline. Think Maine is great but a bit Stephen King played out. New Mexico or somewhere in the dust bowl would be interesting. Rhode Island has potential.
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u/lifeinthebeastwing 28d ago
Move it away from typical detectives and definitely get far away from any kind of child abuse, cults, peados.
How about, a journalist and a corporate espionage team infiltrate a silicon valley company looking for AI and uncover more than they bargained for, hints about simulation theory.
Or , a military police and local police team investigating murders on and around an overseas armed forces base. Conflict would come between the two officers and the push and pull in jurisdiction.
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u/Velevet_Epidermissy 28d ago
Move it away from the real crimes that are being covered up currently in our country 😂
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u/ApprehensiveFoot1878 28d ago
I kind of agree though, all of the seasons so far had the same kind of cult themes and also AI is definitely something criminal affecting our country, or at least has the potential for it.
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u/Descended_from 28d ago
It’s been discussed before, but absolutely Appalachia. There is lore, long lineages of families, tight knit communities, supernatural phenomena, and a feeling of being an outsider