Free Republic

There are plenty that love/like it....But critics mostly panned it. And, sure, there's a legion of viewers (about 12 million per episode) still tuning in each week, but some do so to hate-watch. HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo addressed the so-called haters Thursday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Beverly Hills. ... "Here's what I think," he added. "I think Nic Pizzolatto is one of the best writers working in television and motion pictures today. I think he takes a big swing. All I can tell you is I think the show's ending is as satisfying as any...

There is worthwhile, cinematic television happening on the margins of True Detective – stunning aerial shots of tangled Los Angeles freeways, a California Split-esque low-stakes poker room, musical homages to Twin Peaks. But the closer you get to the show’s center, where a cohesive narrative should be decipherable, you’re drowning a murky puddle of obtuse yet self-important storytelling. ... We know far less about the myriad characters tied up in show’s oblique central plot points: A murder mystery, corruption, drug trafficking, gambling – Nic Pizzolatto is hitting all the crime procedural tropes, but halfway through the season, he hasn’t created...

I hadn’t written anything about the HBO miniseries True Detective until now, because I was never quite sure where it was going. The acting and writing has been superb, but it’s been a guessing game as to the point. The texture of gritty, pulpy detective stories has been a given, as has been the oh-so-predictable gratuitous sex and nudity that goes along with the genre and pretty much every HBO series ever aired (and Showtime, for that matter). Was this going to be a Call of Cthulu update, or another series where viewers get another intellectual Bobby-in-the-shower Dallas moment in...

What are your thoughts on the final episode? I found the manhunt through Carcosa to be over the top INTENSE!!! I couldn't even sit through it. I had to stand and pace a bit with a lot of fidgeting. Also of great interest was Rust Kohle's new attitude when he had what could be called a near death experience and sensed the presence of his daughter.

Orr: So, better late than never, right? In my mid-season assessment last week, I called True Detective the best show on TV. Now we can spend the final four episodes discussing whether the show is able to live up to that high appraisal. (I know that you, Spencer, already have your doubts.) The first three episodes of the series were very much of a piece in terms of pace and mood, before the fourth episode (and particularly its latter half) broke from formula with the biker bar scene and stash-house raid. At the time, I was wondering whether we’d return...

"True Detective," a quietly terrific new series debuting Sunday on HBO, takes its title, though not its style, from a famous old real-crime magazine, popular back when people turned to reading for the sort of stimulation they get mostly through television now. The title might be misleading — there is nothing fact-based about the show, but like its namesake it is planned as an anthology. As in FX's anthology "American Horror Story," each season will tell a discrete story — a strategy that, if nothing else, might attract commitments from name artists interested in long-form storytelling, or prestige television projects,...