The fourth season of True Detective, the gripping crime series that stunned audiences with its 2017 debut, concluded earlier this month with a finale episode that left critics divided.
But one of the most vocal critics has been Nic Pizzolatto, the showrunner who created the series and was at the helm until Issa López who took over for Season 4. Pizzolatto first took to Instagram to call season four’s tenuous links to season one “so stupid” at the end of January.
“I certainly did not have any input on this story or anything else,” he added, in the now-deleted comment. “Can’t blame me.”
Coming off his hot streak of social media shade against Season 4, Pizzolatto is apparently still in a snit, posting the following on Instagram Wednesday: “TRUE DETECTIVE AGGREGATE POST – this here is the place for all your trolling/support/infighting around True Detective and the absolute moral degeneracy and misogyny of anyone who did not think it was good,” he began, in a caption underneath a serious-looking selfie.
“I’d say ‘stay civil’ but of course civility has no place when criticism of a television show indicates some form of Hitlerian evil that must be stamped out,” Pizzolatto continued in his post, seeming to imply that the backlash to his public bashing of Season 4 was akin to him being labeled an evil dictator.
The Daily Beast reached out to Pizzolatto’s representative for comment.
After the finale of Season 4 aired, Pizzolatto re-posted harsh criticisms of the episode on his Instagram story, including missives from people who wrote that the season “was a hot mess of faux character arcs with forced, contrived emotionality” and that “HBO should have stuck with Nic Pizzolatto.”
This caught the attention of many on social media who were incredulous that he could be so petty, as well as Season 4 star Kali Reis, who wrote on X that Pizzolatto’s potshots amounted to “a damn shame.”
“But hey,” she added, “I guess ‘if you don’t have anything good to share, shit on others’ is the new wave.”
“I said what I said,” she added on Tuesday.
Issa López, the director and co-writer of all six episodes of season four, told Vulture last month that she “wrote [season four] with profound love for the work [Pizzolatto] made and love for the people that loved it. And it is a reinvention, and it is different.”
“I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them” López added. “That’s his prerogative.”
