Trouble is their business.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Briefly Noted - True Detective - Television program review - Brief article

The second season of HBO's brooding cop anthology series True Detective trades the mystical nihilism of the first for a grim libertarian fatalism: The whole system is rigged, and there's nothing to be done about it.

The story, insofar as it can be determined, revolves around a scam put on by the City of Vinci--modeled after the reallife California city Vernon, which was set up to bilk taxpay ers and benefit a small band of municipal hoodlums--to enrich city employees and their cronycapitalist pals as a new highspeed rail line is installed.

The show snidely references...