Quote Originally Posted by kleiner352 View Post
It is worth nothing that the showrunner, the lead writer Nic Pizzolatto remained on, and continued to write all the scripts (which is severely unusual for a TV series), it was the director, Cary Fukanaga, who left after directing all eight episodes of season one (which is also severely unusual for a TV series). I'm of the mind that the departure of Fukunaga, whose consistent direction allowed for an uncommonly steady and powerful visual language combined with the fact that the first season's storyline had been worked on by Pizzolatto for years on end before ever approaching HBO and the second's being made by him in an extremely short amount of time comparatively are what led to most of season two's failings.

Part of why it's so rare for one person to write all scripts of one season of TV is that it's an extremely large workload for one mind and while it was possible for season one since there was no schedule or pressure, the issues of that became really clear in the second where you could tell he bit off more than he could chew and ended up not writing anything compelling or unique. If he had a classical American TV writer's room full of talent, I believe something great could've come out of it -- but he didn't, and he didn't have a story in his head that he developed and refined and honed down to the best elements for years, and in turn we got an inconsistent, cliche, uncertain and wobbly-at-the-foundations season-long story that was ultimately a really boring and unenthusiastic exercise in cynicism that never built into anything more than a typical cop show with some flowery dialogue (that sounded absolutely ridiculous and sophomoric).
Agreed! I was talking about director Cary Fukanaga leaving, not the writer, in my previous post. His direction is a huge reason why the first season is as great as it is.