Streaming columnist NICK OVERALL sees hope for  the bold, new True Detective: Night Country turning around the long-running True Detective series curse…

“It’s good, but it’s not as good as the original.”

The age-old adage that’s haunted many a movie or TV show after the first film or season set the bar just a little too high.

Whether it’s the latest Star Wars flick or another reboot of The X Files, the proverb has become all the more common in our era of endless spin-offs and sequels.

There’s perhaps no show that’s suffered more from this than True Detective, an HBO crime anthology series that’s never been able to shake the curse cast on it by its outstanding first season in 2014.

Starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, the original eight episodes explored an eerie murder mystery in the heart of Louisiana and it’s still considered one of the best pieces of crime TV to ever hit the airwaves.

Now 10 years on and four seasons deep and the show hasn’t been able to hit the heights of its debut outing despite each season featuring a different cast of characters and a new central mystery. 

Viewers have been treated to performances from Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, Mahershala Ali and more all cracking cases right across the creepy backstreets and rural plains of America and yet despite such starpower, fans have always been left disappointed by the follow ups, which seem lacklustre in comparison to how the series started.

Enter True Detective: Night Country a bold new entry that aims to turn that around.

This new season drops the male-dominated tone of its predecessors and instead puts Silence of the Lambs star Jodie Foster up front and centre in a setting far removed from those the show has explored so far.

Foster is Liz Danvers, a jaded, weary-eyed detective who patrols Ennis, an icy cold mining town deep in Alaska that gives a distinctly Twin Peaks vibe, albeit a tad more nippy.

“Welcome to the end of the world”, the town’s welcome sign reads. Not quite a tourist hotspot in other words.

Foster is joined by talented TV newcomer Kali Reis who plays Evangeline Navarro, a hardened cop left bitter after a professional break-up with Danvers over a case involving the murder of a native Iñupiat woman a few years earlier.

The season opens with a cracking set-up, set on the last sunset before a wintry night lasting 60 days sets in.

As it does, a team of scientists stationed at an Arctic research facility vanish as quickly as the last bit of light left in the sky. All that remains of them when our unsettled detectives arrive is a severed human tongue accompanied by an eerie message on a whiteboard: “we are all dead”. 

Talk about a cold case. Sign me up.

In TV world, it’s generally a rule of thumb that you don’t shoot something at night unless you absolutely need to. That’s because filming in the dark is as tough on actors as it is the show’s budget, with much more lighting needed to make it work.

But remarkably, Night Country is set entirely in this icy, black setting. The resulting atmosphere almost had me reaching for the heater in the middle of summer.

This new season of True Detective has also become something more akin to a horror show than a crime one.

The series has always had a vaguely supernatural bent, with killers inspired by creepy cults and stories of madness-inducing monsters, but Night Country is embracing the scares more than ever.

It’s a bold decision which will leave some with cold feet and others with renewed interest in the series. Personally, I found myself in the latter camp. The new tone feels fresh in an era rife with garden-variety crime dramas.

So the big question: is Night Country as good as the original?

With only three episodes out on Binge thus far it may be too early to say, but this daring new direction puts True Detective well on track to breaking its long-running curse.