Race and place in black and white: The false dichotomy in true detective

Late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries Louisiana and Los Angeles: times and places that call for sophisticated explorations and representations of race, racism, and racial politics. Yet the two seasons of Nic Pizzolatto’s wildly popular but currently discontinued television series, True Detective, set respectively in Louisiana and L.A., lay out the storylines and characters of white protagonists played by prominent celebrities over and against an assortment of undeveloped, minor black characters played by lesser known actors. White detectives and their private and professional thoughts, lives, behaviors, pasts, feelings, and actions are foregrounded while a pair of ineffectual, acquiescent black detectives; a secretary obscured behind a tall desk; a kidnapped man bound in a neo-Nazi’s closet; a neighborhood full of drug dealers, users, and their children in need of Child Protection Services; a crooked police chief who dies violently on screen; a high-ranking LAPD officer whose politics get her killed mid-season; and more tangential black figures remain literally and figuratively in the shadows.