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Where did it all go so wrong?
After a stellar, award-winning first season, the second season of True Detective limped to a conclusion on Monday night as the finale aired in Australia.
Dubbed an "utter disaster" by critics, the reviews for the second season were scathing as soon as the first episode aired in the shadow of its acclaimed predecessor in June.
True Detective's biggest gamble is its anthology format, which means a whole new cast and narrative each season, making it an almost entirely different show.
Last year, the HBO series was critically acclaimed, picking up a slew of Emmy Awards and Golden Globe nominations for stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.
This year, it was canned as "fatally flawed".
Variety called the second season - headlined by Vince Vaughn as a mob boss and Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell as cops - a "major disappointment".
The finale, in which major characters are killed, was written-off as "anticlimactic", while Rolling Stone accused True Detective's creators of trying to slap "an exclamation point on the season's run-on sentence".
Perhaps the most scathing finale analysis came from Vox.
"After seeing all eight and a half hours of True Detective season two, I think it's fair to peg the entirety of the story somewhere between 'massively disappointing' and 'unmitigated disaster'."
"Creator Nic Pizzolatto didn't have the faintest clue how to tell this story."
The question now remains as to whether HBO will commission another series of the show which was once their crown jewel.
Rolling Stone went so far as to suggest True Detective's creators would need to win back the trust of their viewers.
"It's difficult to see how that trust can be recaptured now, no matter how promising the setting or storyline or how intriguing the actors."
Added Variety: "It will take a while to banish the aftertaste from True Detective, which brought a big-name cast to the party, true, but couldn't overcome writing and execution that was, throughout, fatally flawed."
Nothing made me miss True Detective season 1 more than True Detective season 2— trey wingo (@wingoz)
August 10, 2015
True Detective season 3 storyline idea: detectives investigate why season 2 was so bad— Jamie McKelvie (@McKelvie)
August 10, 2015
I really feel like I enjoyed series 2 of True Detective more and more as the weeks went on and I stopped watching it...— Wil Anderson (@Wil_Anderson)
August 11, 2015
I loved first season of True Detective. Really struggling with second season after 3 eps, just seems all style and bugger all substance IMO.— Rohan Connolly (@rohan_connolly)
August 9, 2015