Caveat: True Detective: Night Country contains creepy and scary moments for older teens and mature audiences. Recently debuting on HBO and streaming all current episodes on MAX, True Detective: Night Country is an anthology that began the first season with showrunner Nic Pizzolatto, who interestingly has used his social media to distance himself from the project now overseen by writer, director, and showrunner Issa López.
Regardless of his opinion, season four is fabulous, and the change in cast and creative vibe have elevated this into a gripping must-see drama that plays upon the backdrop of Polar Night (on average, 30 days of night beginning in mid-December above the Arctic Circle). If you love horror movies, you might remember 30 Days of Night, where vampires terrorized a small Alaskan town. In True Detective, the city of Ennis, Alaska, sees warnings being uttered that "she's awake," a mysterious unseen force that drives the plot, along with inexplicable deaths, random polar bear sightings, a strange symbol reminiscent of past True Detective moments, and a brutal murder of a native Alaskan woman who is tied to this permeating evil that has settled over the town like the unending night.
With Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as the lead actors, you will be piecing together as these two investigate the strange disappearance of several workers from a research station. Slight spoiler alert: these men meet a horrible fate in a manner that defies logic.
In several interviews, Lopez has credited the inspiration for this never-ending nocturnal nightmare to real-life mysteries, including spontaneous human combustions, the infamous Dyatlov Pass incident that yielded unexplained deaths of experienced hikers, and the Mary Celeste ghost ship that disappeared in 1872.
I noted that the female-forward cast and creative forces added nuance and depth to what could have devolved into a derivative of the classic horror film, The Thing, or 30 Days of Night knockoff. This TV series is far more intelligent thanks to the direction Lopez took the narrative, regardless of what Mr. Pizzolato is putting out there on his social media. He did a fine job with True Detective season one, but I lost interest in this series until season 4.
To set the tableau, Ennis Police Department chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), who has been investigating the disappearance of the researchers at the enigmatic and well-funded Tsalal Arctic Research Station, finds them and then calls the discovery a "corpsicle." I mentioned this to Mellissa on the air, hoping that anyone watching and listening would discover the wide world of cinematic prosthetics, makeup, and visual effects along with the art department's main department head: the production designer. These amazing below-the-line craftspeople all worked together to create this arresting (and disturbing) visual masterpiece. There are so many lucrative and fun careers in "Hollywood" that you can educate a creative kid about what to pursue.
During Episode 2, the "corpsicle" is excavated and transferred to an ice rink for a slow defrost to mitigate soft tissue damage. Variety interviewed the prosthetics designers Lou and Dave Elsey, who were in charge of constructing the giant set piece. "It was about telling a story of what these guys went through. She (Issa) wanted individual stories told within this mass of flesh," said Lou Elsey to Variety.
Using computer modeling and visual storytelling, these men made a rough model out of dolls all designed on a computer, with the actors heading to London for the physical plaster casting where every bit of them was scanned, and the plaster casts captured their contorted shapes. Then, silicone molds were next so that the prosthetic makeup team could realistically render soft tissue damage, adding even more horror to the final product, immersed in hollowed-out deep ice and then frozen on set in Iceland.
Idaho Today goes to Acton, California, and the Peppertree Ranch for Wild West Chronicles and Elkhorn!
Last week, I was a guest of INSP for the set visit to see the impressive ranch owned by partners Gary Tarpinian and Paninee Theeranuntawat of MorningStar Entertainment, where season four of Wild West Chronicles was filming an episode written by show host and star Jack Elliott about the exploits of John Wesley Hardin.
INSP's true-to-history hit anthology series follows the legendary Bat Masterson (Jack Elliott), once a lawman who traded his sheriff's badge for a pen to become a newspaper reporter. This lawman of the late 1800s now guides us as a New York-based reporter. Each week, Masterson gathers the true stories and shapes the subject matter with profiles of Western notables such as Annie Oakley, Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, Bass Reeves, Butch Cassidy, Stagecoach Mary and Emmett Dalton, to name a few. Masterson gathers the facts and tells the tale, where actors reenact in authentic period costumes, arms, and an on-point production design that seamlessly immerses the viewer into the moment.
We also got a preview of Ellkhorn, the next INSP original drama that focuses on the cowboy years for Theodore Roosevelt, just after he lost his wife and mother within the same day. How did Teddy become a Rough Rider and fearless outdoorsman before becoming president of the United States? The Badlands and Elkhorn, his ranch, was where he cut his teeth and became a man by life experience, trial and error. "Our storytelling is like haiku for Westerns; every word is important; they're passion plays," mused Tarpinian about scripting for the half-hour format for his storytelling.
He showed off the beautifully recreated Elkhorn ranch building built to the most exacting specs that Teddy Roosevelt had built, "This set is as important to our story as the Ponderosa was to Bonanza; we have the authentic Elkhorn, built to scale, even the interior was matched to images and historical data of what was in each room, 1884 and 1885 was really the end of the West with buffalo and the roaming gunslingers, here we had a 25-year-old kid whose life was falling apart, he wanted to go out to the badlands where he could still experience and catch it."
Stay tuned to Idaho Today for more on Idaho native Mason Beals, the star of Elkhorn (April 11, 2024), and more news about Wild West Chronicles, all airing on INSP.
Idaho Today talks to Free Solo and Arctic Ascent star Alex Honnold
While I was in Acton seeing the sets for INSP's original series, Mellisa had an exclusive chat with Nat Geo star Alex Honnold, the subject of the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary Free Solo. Mellisa will have more on his latest for Nat Geo, called Arctic Ascent, where he leads a team of climbers and scientists across virgin land and frozen lakes of Greenland in pursuit of samples and data for climatologists to analyze to see exactly what is happening to our rapidly warming planet. The full interview is coming up, but she shared with me that Alex also has a Boise connection!
Keep watching Idaho Today as we get the untold stories and unique perspectives for TV, film, and music.