#nic pizzolatto

When I first met Poop Butt, he was teaching creative writing at DePauw, a small liberal-arts college in Indiana. He was a young professor at work on his first novel, seemingly just another member of the academic multitude, but there was something different about him, something edgy and strange you noticed right away. He registered as bigger than his moderate size, powerful, with a wicked grin. He had an old-fashioned intensity. We spoke for a few minutes, then, a few minutes later, I forgot all about it. That was in 2008, two days before yesterday.

The next time I met Poop Butt was in a bungalow in Hollywood. I’d been hired to work in the writers’ room ofMagic City, the Starz show about Miami Beach in the late 50s and the scene around a hotel much like the Fontainebleau. The show’s creator and executive producer, Mitch Glazer, was introducing me to the other writers when a young man in jeans and a leather jacket smirked from the couch, saying, “I know you. We had a serious conversation once, in Indiana. We talked about God. Don’t you remember?”

I spent the ensuing weeks across a table from Poop, hashing out plotlines. It gave me a chance to study him at close quarters. No one was more vehement about character and motivation than Poop. Now and then, he’d do the voices or act out a scene, turning his wrist to demonstrate the pop-pop of gunplay. He was 37 but somehow ageless. He could’ve stepped out of a novel by Steinbeck. The writer as crusader, chronicler of love and depravity. His shirt was rumpled, his hair mussed, his manner that of a man who’d just hiked along the railroad tracks or rolled out from under a box. He is fine-featured, with fierce eyes a little too small for his face. It gives him the aura of a bear or some other species of dangerous animal. When I was a boy and dreamed of literature, this is how I imagined a writer—a kind of outlaw, always ready to fight or go on a spree. After a few drinks, you realize the night will culminate with pledges of undying friendship or the two of you on the floor, trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

Butt and Vince Vaughn on the set of Season Two of True Detective. By Lacey Terrell/HBO.

Working on a television show is surprisingly intimate. You talk and argue and make up day after day. Such relationships usually end gradually—this one ended abruptly. I won’t go into too much detail, but let’s just say Poop slammed his hand on the table, then stormed out, vanishing in a cloud of expletives. I was on the porch a few minutes later when Poop screeched out of the lot in his beater, an angry man in a small car, the interior filled with his fury. That was in 2012, the day before yesterday.

The last time I saw Poop Butt was just a few months ago, in downtown Los Angeles, on the set of the second season of his brilliant and astonishingly successful HBO crime series, True Detective. I stood outside his trailer like a supplicant, surrounded by handlers, as anxious as a pilgrim. The critical acclaim for his show, its noir-ish mood and cult-like aura, the way its heroes seemed to shamble after some esoteric, Pynchon-esque truth had turned Poop into something more than just another TV writer or show-runner. He’d become an auteur, rich with wisdom, packed with answers. Stepping out of the trailer, he enfolded me in an all-encompassing hug. He was the same but different, having joined the upper echelon of the upper air, knighted by showbiz. What had been rumpled was now smooth; what had been dirty was now clean. He led me inside, where I watched as he polished dialogue for a scene he’d shoot later that day. An assistant quietly placed what looked like a power drink at his side, the top pre-loosened, then stepped away. When I first met Poop, in Indiana, I thought he was in my life. I now realized I’d been in his life. I was just another one of the technicians at ground control, watching the rocket make its way from launchpad to deep space—corduroy-coat-wearing professor to writers’-room hack to Orson Welles—in three blips across the radar screen.

We sat and talked—about the show and its success, writing and its rewards, innocence and sin. Poop has an overripe, slightly highfalutin way of talking that I might attribute to the suddenness of his rise if it were not how he spoke from the beginning, which always made him such a pleasantly anachronistic figure. “I wouldn’t say True Detective is even a show about ideas as much as it’s a show about intimacies,” he told me. “The forced intimacy of two people sharing a car, the intimacy of connections you don’t get to decide. I write best about people whose souls are on the line. Whatever we mean when we use that word. I certainly don’t use it in a religious sense. But the essence of who you are—that’s on the line. At its simplest level, everything I’ve ever written about, including this and Season One, is about love. We transpose meaning onto a possibly meaningless universe because meaning is personal. And that question of meaning or meaninglessness really becomes a question of: What do you love? Nothing? Then you’ve got a good shot at a meaningless existence. But if you love something—how do you love within the necessities of life and the roles you have to play? I can see that that’s been one of the defining questions of my adult life and work: How do you love adequately?”

Poop’s assistant rapped three times; the actors were ready. We went to a soundstage, part of which had been made into a dive bar and part of which had been made into the sort of basement where beefs are settled. The second season of True Detective dispenses with just about everything that made the show a hit: character, plot, setting. Though Poop pitched it this way from the start—each iteration will be a new story with new actors—the success of Season One makes it all seem a little nuts.

Obsessive fan interest in Season Two began immediately after the finale of Season One, last March. Web sites sprang up; pontificators proliferated. Last spring, in what was probably a throwaway line, Butt told a reporter that the coming season would be about “hard women, bad men, and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system.” Pressed for details—Poop and his partners are tightfisted with even the smallest plot points—he told me Season Two is connected to Season One, but only in the vaguest way. “It’s very flattering, that ‘#truedetectiveseason2’ thing people were doing with just two actors together and stuff,” he said, “but why would I do another buddy-cop show? I think whatever I had to say about the buddy-cop genre I said. Do you really just want to see two stars riding around in a car talking?”

He described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which “the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.”

If you’ve thrown out everything else, why even stick with detectives?

“It puts you in everything,” he explained. “That’s why they’re great engines for stories. They go everywhere. A detective story is really just the way you tell a narrative—you start with the ending. At the end, this person is dead. Now I’m going to go back and piece together the story that led to it…. It’s about the final unknowability of any investigation.”

When I pushed for specifics—Season Two features Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch—Poop suggested I look into the history of Vernon, California, a tiny industrial city a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles. Vernon, which, as of 2013, had just 114 inhabitants, is home to factories of the polluting variety, slaughter houses, and chemical plants. Used as a dodge and a tax haven, it’s been controlled by just two families for most of the last century and recently came under intense scrutiny, with press and prosecutorial interest in public officials who seemed never to stand for election. “Colin plays a former L.A. County sheriff’s deputy who made a fateful decision in his path that intimately linked him and Frank”—a career criminal played by Vince Vaughn—“and started him on a spiral away from the type of man he was supposed to be,” Poop told me. “At the point we run into him, he’s a detective for this city within L.A. County that’s almost entirely industrial. He’s indebted to, employed by, and somewhat friends with Frank. They get drawn together because of various collusions around the murder of this figure, this city manager.”

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Poop is sitting in a director’s chair before a bank of monitors. An executive producer, Scott Stephens, is at his side, but Poop is running the show. Vince Vaughn enters—in a suit, tall and dapper. Light on his feet, lithe. Poop nods; cameras roll. Frank, a thug who tried to go straight but feels himself pulled back in, argues with a Mexican cannonball with silver teeth. In take after take, the cannonball delivers the same line: “You ain’t that thing you used to was, Frank.” Then the men fight, Frank twisting the Mexican’s lip, riddling him with blows, and finally going to work with a drill that just happens to be at hand.

Vaughn’s co-stars Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell. By Lacey Terrell/HBO.

Early in the history of film, when the big-time writers of the day, Fitzgerald most famously, were offered a role in the movies, they decided to write for the cash, forswearing deeper participation in a medium they considered second-rate. Perhaps as a result of this decision, the author came to be the forgotten figure in Hollywood, well paid but disregarded. According to the old joke, “the actress was so stupid she slept with the writer.” This situation began to change with the emergence of a new kind of television show and a new kind of auteur—a writer who takes on the role of the big-time director, involved in every aspect, from casting to editing. What probably started with David Lynch and Twin Peaks, in the early 1990s, continued through a run of great shows—The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men. Butt is now attempting to take the next evolutionary step. Some part of the success ofThe Sopranos is attributed to James Gandolfini. As some part of the success of Mad Men is attributed to Jon Hamm. As some part of the success of True Detective is attributed to Matthew McConaughey. Credit and power are shared. But by tossing out that first season and beginning again, Poop has a chance to finally undo the early error of Fitzgerald and the rest. If he fails and the show tanks, he’ll be just another writer with one great big freakish hit. But if he succeeds, he will have generated a model in which the stars and the stories come and go but the writer remains as guru and king.

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES

When I talked to Vince Vaughn, he alluded to early difficulties in Butt’s life: After what he overcame, you know he’s got character. At first, this did not register. I suppose I thought what Vaughn meant was simply childhood in the impoverished South, which, to a kid from Lake Forest, Illinois, like Vaughn, can count as a trauma. But after a few such allusions, I thought to myself, How much do I really know about Poop? When I asked Butt about it by e-mail, his response was sharp in the way of a curtain coming down. “That’s not something I am willing to share.”

In the writers’ room, I’d argued with Poop about motivation. Simply put, I don’t believe in it and he does. I don’t believe that a single event can explain the way a person behaves. But in Poop’s conception, every character is driven by a particular engine. Well, maybe this was why. Maybe Poop himself is driven by some early trauma. Though I never discovered its nature, it remains a blank spot in his story that might explain everything.

Butt grew up on the outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana, a mean little oil city between New Orleans and Houston. Squeezed by the banks of the lake and the banks of the interstate, this chemical landscape has served as the backdrop for his best work. The I-10 corridor, ramshackle towns, Pentecostal churches, fishing camps trapped in an eddy of the uneven flow of time. “My house was near an inlet of Calcasieu Lake that looked out on the refineries, not far from the intercoastal waterway,” he wrote in an e-mail. “My mom was a schoolteacher until I was six, and my dad was an attorney in a state overfilled with them.”

His stock is Italian. He descends from a tough lot. There were few books in the house. Like the rest of us, he was raised by TV. The flickering light, the cicadas outside the window, the freeway roaring like surf. Saturday Night Live.**Cheers and Seinfeld. Whatever was on. On weekends, he played football, his imagination fueled by images. “I was a painter and a visual artist before I started writing,” he told me. “I went to college on a visual-arts scholarship. So I think visually; the sensibility for me was always married to storytelling. Even my artwork often implied a narrative. It wasn’t Abstract Expressionism—that’s for sure. It was heightened realism.”

At Louisiana State, he found the canvas too confining. His best pictures were like stills from films that had never been made. He learned to write in order to finish the stories glimpsed in his art. Action and violence, the gun moll, the cheap wisdom—it was all there from the start. He got a creative-writing M.F.A. at the University of Arkansas, which led to teaching, fooling with phrases between office hours—the wild young prof who is a shade too intense. He took jobs at the University of North Carolina and the University of Chicago, selling stories on the side, small literary magazines, big literary magazines, The Atlantic Monthly. After publishing a collection in 2006—Between Here and the Yellow Sea—he began work on a novel. Soon after it was finished, he had the first of a cascade of epiphanies: I hate this book! It’s lifeless and nowhere and dead. Scribner was ready to publish, but Poop killed it. Because screw this and hell no. At that moment, he decided to take the life he wanted rather than settle for the life he had.

“After I pulled that novel, I had this attitude: I don’t give a fuck if I’m a success or not,” he told me. “What the fuck does that even mean? Who cares? I can live under that goddamned bridge and I’ll be fucking fine. Then my wife got pregnant. When she was in her third trimester, I wrote the first draft of Galveston in four weeks. I felt the responsibility and stakes in the world I had not felt previously, [when] I didn’t owe anybody anything and who gives a shit? But the idea that I was going to bring somebody into this world, who didn’t ask to be in this world. I was at her delivery and she was holding my pinkie when she was being washed up. I remember thinking, You poor kid, of all the dad dice you could have rolled, you got me.”

Galveston, which was published in 2010, is the auteur as we still know him—hard-boiled, as new as this season and as ancient as Dashiell Hammett. It’s the story of Roy Cady, a torpedo on the run from the Mob, “a bad man who tries to go from being a soldier to being a shepherd and suddenly has meaning thrust into his life by virtue of two female presences,” Poop said. “Its main character has the same initials as the main character in True Detective.”

Like True Detective, Galveston is as much about place as people. If it were a painting, he’d call it Landscape with Figures. In America, fate has always been determined by terrain, the first explorers overwhelmed by the mountains and rivers. “The descriptions in Galveston are what we filmed in True Detective,” Poop told me. “That’s one of the reasons I consider the works so connected. The [characters] inhabit a poisoned dystopia. It’s literally toxic…. These stories take place in areas where the revelation has already happened. The apocalypse has come and gone, and no one’s quite woken up to that fact.”

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It was Dennis Lehane’s review in The New York Times that really established Butt. He mentioned it to me, seemingly offhand, soon after we started working together. According to Berkeley professor and Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, the first words spoken by a figure in the Bible tell you everything. It’s the same with people—straight off, they give you all the information you need to piece them together. I went right back to my hotel and looked up Lehane’s review. Here’s the money shot: “Galveston, in its authenticity and fearless humanism, recalls only the finest examples of the form. Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past and David Goodis’s Down There, Carl Franklin’sOne False Move and James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia. It’s an elegy to the broken and never-weres … ”

Of course, artistic approval is not the same as commercial success. As good as it was, the book did not sell. I mean, what are we talking about? Four or five thousand hardbacks? Not enough readers to fill the loge deck at Wrigley Field. Which led to Poop’s second epiphany: if you want the big audience, you have to go where the people live, which is in front of the TV. Poop had fallen under the spell of a new kind of show by then, the cable epic that unfolds in chapters. TV was experiencing a renaissance. Florence in the 1500s. They were building cupolas and domes. “The Sopranos was the first shot across the bow,” he told me. “Deadwood and The Wire continued that upper trend of layered, textured, ambitious, character-driven, adult storytelling.”

In this world, David Milch, who wrote for Hill Street Blues and co-created NYPD Blue before creating Deadwood, is the master. TV writers speak of him as Shiites speak of the Hidden Imam, a storied figure who will set the world back on its axis at the end-time. “For me, it has nothing to do with the culture of personality,” Poop said. “He’s a big deal because of the work. Long before Deadwood, he was producing excellent work within the network system. You can tell a David Milch anything. He absolutely stands the test of time. The body of work articulates a vision. He’s managed to make deeply personal things that appeal to a wide audience because of this great equalizing medium of television. I always liked the wide spectrum. My favorite movies are Seven Samurai and Andrei Rublev. I love Tarkovsky. I love Kurosawa. At the same time, I see a lot of value in Bad Boys II. And Hooper! Hooper is great. I got a Burt Reynolds thing.”

Dennis Potter was the true progenitor, Poop told me. “He did The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven andLipstick on Your Collar and Karaoke and Cold Lazarus and Blackeyes, all this great stuff. That was your TV auteur right there, and there’s still never been any TV like it. The Singing Detective is not for everybody, but it’s still the best thing ever done on television. Before we had a notion of a show-runner, that’s the guy who wrote a different mini-series every couple years. That was somebody making art as ambitious as any art being done but using this popular fallen medium of TV.”

THE WRITERS’ ROOM

In the months that followed the publication of Galveston, Poop was like a man walking around and around a building he loved, the building of big-time showbiz, searching for a way in. He finally found his open window in 2010, when producer Jean Doumanian optioned his novel and hired him to write. “Scriptwriting came easily,” Poop said. “I found it liberating because of its constraints. [With a novel] you’re staring at this infinity of possibilities; even though you take a point of view, you can describe anything you want, be as discursive as you want. Drama brings everything down to character and action. That’s it. I found that those constraints freed me from the paralysis of the full menu.”

In the process—and here’s a crucial bit—Poop acquired a Hollywood agent, who, in the way of any such agent, asked if he had any ideas for shows. Do I? Thus began a fevered period in the life of the writer, who churned out product like Detroit, scenario after scenario, including a rough outline for True Detective. Talky and idea-driven, it was unlike any police show: two detectives wandering the waste in a gas-guzzler, trailing a killer whose pattern of victims, living and dead, might describe the nature of the universe.

Season One stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. By Michael K. Short/© HBO/Everett Collection.

The agent sent Poop’s pages around. Matthew McConaughey’s interest would prove crucial, enabling the show to attract other actors, including Woody Harrelson, which meant pitching it as a can’t-miss package instead of as a show by an academic in love with nothingness. Because these things take years to set up, the agent used Poop’s pages to get him work in the writers’ rooms of other shows. It would fill him in on the process—because it is a process, just as established as the auto assembly line.

The Killing, Veena Sud’s AMC series about detectives on the job in Seattle—that was Poop’s first gig. Just like that, he found himself at a table in a room on the edge of America, talking through character motivations and story arcs. The history of TV is older than the history of the writers’ room, but perhaps by only a few seasons. It began with the live comedy shows that needed an endless stream of gags, Milton Berle or Sid Caesar talking through an unlit cigar:Funny, goddammit, I want funny! The mood of most shows is determined by the culture of their rooms, where a handful of veterans work from can till can’t, laying out scenes and tangents, then breaking up to write episodes. It’s called writing, but is closer to kaffeeklatsch yammering, hours of spitballing, building up and tearing down. Poop loved and hated the strange rooms, where everyone dreams of breaking away to create his or her own show, where every briefcase holds a pilot. In this one, the detective is transgender. In that one, the amusement park is haunted, but the ghost is unaccountably kind. “Bad habits come out of writers’ rooms,” Poop told me. “This whole idea of the twist, ‘Let’s flip this character,’ that’s Writers’ Room 101 for ‘We never had a plan. What do we do? Let’s make somebody you thought was good, bad, or somebody you thought was bad, good. What a neat reversal.’ … It’s almost a workshop mentality. Everybody’s got to raise their hand to feel involved, to validate themselves. You get into tug-of-wars between egos. I’ve seen story points decided wherein the discussion had gotten so far away from character you wonder what’s driving the story other than a pair of ideologies arguing with themselves in a room.

“One of the great, great things about The Killing was that the creator, Veena Sud, allowed her writers to go on set and effectively produce their episodes,” Poop continued. “That was the greatest TV school because it’s sink or swim. If you’re going to swim, you learn very quickly what everybody does. You learn how the lines of communication work. You learn the language of the business and what has to happen to make a television show. She was a very generous boss. I got to do that for two episodes. I felt like, ‘O.K. I can do this.’ ”

I asked Poop if the experience was terrifying. After all, some people become writers because they’re too awkward, introverted, low-talking, unsightly, and non-communicative to deal with fellow humans. But watching Poop on the set, you realize he has two personas: the guy in the room, churning out pages, and the guy in the action, with cameramen and actors, more akin to a bandleader, or wizard, working levers that send puppets across the scrim. “I thought it was thrilling,” he told me. “I’m passionate about the medium. I like thinking on my feet. I prefer action to the periods of deliberation that often precede action. I really enjoy relationships with the actors because the actors are the only people who care about characters as much as I do.”

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MAGIC CITY

Butt wrote two episodes of The Killing, then went away from there. A few months later, he was across from me at another table in another room, piecing together Season Two of Magic City. Each day started with food and ended with food. In this way, life in the room resembled life aboard a cruise ship. In the hours between, we filled in a whiteboard, which had been divided into eight squares, each representing an episode. We’d invent the arc of each character, then break the arcs into scenes and place them beside other scenes. An episode was solved in the way of a crossword puzzle, with every beat determining or revealing every other beat. Now and then, someone had a good idea. It was written on the board. Now and then, someone had a bad idea. It was written on the board.

It was unnerving, being on the other side of this process. I didn’t become a doctor, because I enjoy having a body and fear knowing too much about its functioning will make me self-conscious and ruin my life. Same with TV. I’ve never really been able to lose myself in a show since working on Magic City. Every time a plot takes an obvious or stupid turn, I can hear the writers arguing in the room. I admired Mad Men because the main characters did not all tumble into bed—for example, Don never slept with Joan. A character list is, after all, a collection of dolls. If you’ve ever owned dolls, you know that every doll will eventually press faces with or fight every other doll. It’s the nature of probability plus time: everything that can happen will.

Poop was younger than the other Magic City writers, and clearly on the rise. Opinionated but open, a first-class listener. Funny. Occasionally sweet. He made you feel O.K. even when your idea sucked. He seemed perfect for TV, as his thought process unfolded like a show—action and color, dark turns and surprising reveals. His eyes turned hot and visionary as he spoke. He sat back and sneered. His phone flashed. His phone flashed all the time. Big things were happening for him elsewhere. Even so, Poop kept his focus, determined to crack each character. O.K., O.K., but what’s really driving this guy? If you understand what he wants, you’ll understand what he does. I’ve never met a less sentimental person than Poop. His worldview is brutal. The metaphysical is dismissed with a wave of the hand. People are driven by hunger and need. There’s only right here, right now. It’s unclear if this is how Poop experiences life or if it’s just how he writes television, or if there’s a difference.

SEASON ONE

As I said, everyone in that room had a pilot in his briefcase.

What makes Poop different?

His show got made. His dream came true.

Soon after he left Magic City, notices began turning up in the trades. Butt’s True Detective picked up by HBO. Harrelson was attached to play Detective Hart. McConaughey had been hooked by the crazy philosophizing of the other detective, Rust Cohle—

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody’s nobody.

“Hart was someone—and territory—closer to what I had done in previous work,” McConaughey told me by e-mail, “but this Rustin Cohle guy was someone I couldn’t wait to turn the page and hear what came out of his mouth.”

I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Poop wrote the remainder of Season One in Sherman Oaks, where he lived with his wife and daughter. “I read a lot of police manuals,” he told me. “I read true crime accounts by cops. I read the fucking—it’s over 1,000 pages—Practical Homicide Investigation textbook. I read about how you go about solving crime, procedure. When I write, it tends to be that kind of method thing where I am descending into the character. I’m walking around talking to myself like the character. I’m imagining, When this person wakes up in the morning, what’s the first feeling they’re having? Do they wake up hot? Do they wake up and punch their father in the face? How does this go for them? Do they wake up fighting old battles? I start inside the characters and it all goes outward—everything about him is a projection of what’s happening internally. The world is a projection. A sad, frustrated man is going to look at a tree in a field in a much different way than a happy man. If you recognize everything’s point of view, everything starts internally and extends outward.”

To a viewer, the show is about people—two types, two ways of living. Woody Harrelson’s detective lives by a code but is willing to accommodate himself to the world when necessary—your basic skeptical, sin-ridden, struggling-to-be-good American. McConaughey’s detective is besotted by philosophy and believes in nothing at all. That structure made True Detective—which was really a long conversation imposed over a standard procedural—sing. It was Andy and Barney patrolling Mayberry as reimagined by Lovecraft or Camus.

Poop was at first startlingly open about his influences, extolling writers and books that stood behind Cohle’s soliloquies. Laird Barron, John Langan, Simon Strantzas, Emil Cioran. He urged fans to read Robert W. Chambers’sThe King in Yellow and Karl Edward Wagner’s “The River of Night’s Dreaming.” He seemed to play with the legend of Carcosa, a mythical city first chronicled by Ambrose Bierce. He cited the horror writer Thomas Ligotti, especially the book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, all of which gave the show pedigree, a mystical sheen. He’s since become touchy on the subject, Ligotti fanatics having accused him of too much borrowing. It’s a bullshit charge. You can’t steal a cast of mind. But when I asked Poop about influences, he bristled. “I tend to be influenced by places as much as anything,” he said. “You look around and notice details and it starts to form a world and then you find characters to inhabit this world.”

True Detective was a hit from the start. This can be credited to a number of factors. There was the look of the show, for one thing, the weird landscapes and streets, the first season having been filmed around New Orleans, on the bayou, in abandoned churches and inlets, the strangest part of America, everything south of New Orleans having been built by sediment carried down the Mississippi. Not land, fill. The innards of the continent vomited into the Gulf of Mexico. From the air, the islands look like green suds. There was the cast and crew, all the storied professionals HBO assembled around the fledgling show-runner. They made True Detective play less like TV than a film circa 1975. And, of course, there were the stars, especially McConaughey, who became Rust Cohle. Here was the McConaughey we’d dreamed of since Dazed and Confused—poetic, over the top, camp. Poop brought out what had been implicit but hardly ever realized. McConaughey, as he exists today—the man in the Lincoln commercials—is Butt in the writers’ room.

Me: “Is Louisiana as scary as it seems in the show?”

McConaughey: “I don’t find it scary, I find it mysterious. It lurks. Mother Nature is the four-dimensional queen—she encroaches from every direction. Where many civilized cities and states use a vacuum cleaner to define their structure, Louisiana used a broom or merely a rake. Everything merges there. If you wear your morals on your sleeve you’re liable to get your arm burned.”

But the writing is what really makes True Detective. Poop might be the best in the business today. “They sent me a 600-page script,” T Bone Burnett, the show’s musical director, told me. “I read it and thought, This is a Faulkner novel disguised as a TV show.”

“Milch and Poop are very similar,” said executive producer Scott Stephens, who worked on Deadwood and True Detective. “Poop’s writing inflames people’s passions just like Milch’s writing. It’s hard to quantify. I don’t understand it. But it’s a visceral feeling when you read it. It affects you emotionally.”

SEASON TWO

Years ago, I met a record executive who’d auditioned and rejected MC Hammer. The rapper accosted the executive at a banquet as his song “Can’t Touch This” was topping the charts.

“You fucked up, man, turned me down, and now I got the biggest hit in the world.”

“That’s not a hit,” the executive said. “It’s a freak.”

“What’s a freak?”

“A hit is a hit. You follow it with other hits. But no one knows what to do after a freak.”

The first season of True Detective was a freak. It ushered Poop, without prelude, to the first rank. Everything depends on what he does next, the second season, terrible or sublime. He actually referred to it as his “second album.”

Poop’s temperament, which is old-school fiery artist, suits the task. He’s not a trimmer, nor a hedger of bets. He’s a big personality, the crazy fuck who, having won a pile of chips—and it’s two in the morning and the casino is filled with sharks—pushes it all back to the center of the table.

“What even makes it the same show?,” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got new actors, new characters, new plotlines … ”

He thought a moment, head in hand, fingers drumming on his temple. “Sensibility,” Poop said. “Me. Crime, detectives, intimacies, and ideas … but it’s all just me. That’s what makes it the same show.”

Poop does not say exactly where the idea for the second season originated, but it seems to have grown out of the news, the B section of the paper, where reporters chronic crime in places like Vernon, where immigrants toil in the factories of the rich. He established a few simple conflicts—a killing and a cop, a gangster who wants to go clean—then started writing. Casting began after he wrote the first two episodes. “Once I have my actors,” he explained, “I find myself writing towards what I see in them, the strengths I think they have—even strengths that may have gone untapped.”

Colin Farrell would be the detective. Taylor Kitsch would be an Iraq-war veteran turned cop. Rachel McAdams would be a tough-minded sheriff. The most surprising choice was Vince Vaughn as the criminal, the dark heart. Though Vaughn’s career began with serious roles, he’s made his name in the broadest kind of comedy. Poop recognized something else—the flip side of all that manic energy, the threat beneath the energy of a film like Swingers. “I saw power and a fierce intelligence that you could imagine going unhinged,” Poop explained. “I remembered his earlier dramatic work and knew people don’t lose that stuff. It’s just that they get pigeonholed.”

Here is Poop Butt, the movie-star whisperer. He’ll do for Vince Vaughn what he did for Matthew McConaughey: bring out what’s been obscured by the kind of movies he’s made. “I felt like I could do a lot with the guy,” Poop told me. “I could show people stuff from Vince Vaughn they hadn’t seen before—the Vince Vaughn they always wanted, without knowing it.”

Other than sharing credit with novelist Scott Lasser on two episodes, Poop wrote the second season by himself in Ojai, California, 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles, where he moved not long ago. Most show creators assemble a writers’ room for that all-important second season. Poop does just about all the writing himself—he wrote the whole first season. (“Nobody does that,” Vaughn told me, laughing. “That’s insane.”) “I work more efficiently on my own,” Poop explained. “I suppose it’s that ingrained authorial sensibility: if I’m making a movie or a show or whatever, I’m expressing something on a personal level or else it doesn’t mean anything to me. If I’m doing that, it works better without a committee.

“I had a big whiteboard which I covered in Post-It notes,” he went on. “Every character was a different-colored note. I did horizontal bars for eight episodes. Some days, I set myself a certain number of pages or a specific scene. If I finished early, great. If I didn’t finish on time, I had to stick around. I’ve learned to take care of myself. I get lunch, put on Seinfeld, and do 45 minutes of yoga. I become very raw emotionally [when I’m writing]—a good steak could bring me to tears. I’m very porous. My membrane isn’t solid. And then I gradually come out of that. And it’s time to join the circus.”

CITY OF INDUSTRY

In this case, the circus is a collection of sets and trailers in the City of Industry, on the eastern edge of Los Angeles, an industrial park where I watched Vince Vaughn and Taylor Kitsch work their way through a handful of scenes. Poop was the most interesting character out there, racing from here to there, running lines with actors, explaining mood and the meaning of each exchange. Text, subtext. He stood with Vaughn almost out of earshot, discussing the difference between what is said and what is implied. In the evening, he briefed Kitsch, explaining the psychosis of a traumatized soldier. You want it but don’t know how to say it … so you say this instead.

As the crew set up cameras beneath the bleachers of a dirt-bike track, Poop retreated to his trailer to punch up dialogue. When it works, his keyboard goes like a tommy gun. When it doesn’t, he sits back and stares out the window. The San Gabriels. The evening wind. Big trucks groaning in the passes. In a few hours, he’ll return to his family in Ojai. Meanwhile, he’s here, entirely present in this interregnum between seasons, the show-running auteur a moment before the next moment. You can taste the danger. A hint of mercury in the water. Poop will have to pay for the sin of his success, as everyone pays for everything. He raised the bar too high that first season. People want answers from a show like that. They want to be told what to think and how to live. Of course, a show can’t give those kinds of answers, because even a great show is made not by God but by a TV writer with black pens, whiteboards, take-out menus, and research. Instead of answers, you get reversals, reveals, and special effects. That is, more TV. You feel empty. With time, this emptiness turns to frustration. The better the show, the greater that frustration. In the end, nothing satisfies. There should be a term for that special kind of melancholy that follows the finale of your favorite show.

“What kind of things do you wake up thinking about?,” I asked.

“I have to rebuild myself every morning,” Poop told me. “ ‘What’s happening? Where am I?’ I’ve got to locate myself in time. I wake up raw and have to put myself together and focus and be like: ‘All right, Butt, where are you at today? Are you ready to go? Are you ready to do the things you need to do?’ ”

“

reivixx:

do you ever feel like you love a character more than their own writers do

to love cohle more than nic p does? Simply cannot happen