I’ve been enjoying the HBO series “True Detective,” which our reviewer Kevin McFarland has been recapping each Sunday night. But I also enjoyed Emily Nussbaum’s essay in the New Yorker on the show’s “shallow deep talk,” exploring how the program’s female characters are portrayed through a male gaze, and how other crime shows have avoided this.
“[Y]ou might take a close look at the show’s opening credits, which suggest a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses,” she writes. “The more episodes that go by, the more I’m starting to suspect that those asses tell the real story.”
Related: “Yes, True Detective treats its female characters badly. That’s the point,” writes Willa Paskin at Slate, in her True Detective critique “The Horrible Things That Men Do to Women.”