‘True Detective: Night Country’ Creator Issa López Responds to Nic Pizzolatto Diss

Issa López, Nic Pizzolatto
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images, Hector Vivas/Getty Images

After True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto spoke ill of True Detective: Night Country — the rebooted fourth season of his HBO show — Night Country creator Issa López offered an empathetic (if not dismayed) response.

“I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create, and whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them. That’s his prerogative,” López told Vulture in a recent interview. “I wrote this with profound love for the work he made and love for the people that loved it. And it is a reinvention, and it is different, and it’s done with the idea of sitting down around the fire, and [let’s] have some fun and have some feelings and have some thoughts. And anybody that wants to join is welcome.”

As seen in a screenshot posted to Reddit, Pizzolatto trashed the current season on Instagram, writing in one comment that he “certainly did not have input” on Night Country’s story, despite his executive-producer credit. “Can’t blame me,” he added.

In another comment, Pizzolatto said that a Season 4 throwback to Season 1 was “so stupid.”

Nic Pizzolatto makes some interesting comments about Night Country on Instagram
byu/Magehunter_Skassi inTrueDetective

Vulture did point out, however, that Night Country is second only to True DetectiveSeason 1 in audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Plus, Night Country currently has the best Tomatometer rating — 93 percent — of the True Detective series so far; the second season, which Pizzolatto plotted, has the worst at 47 percent.

As Deadline notes, Pizzolatto also distanced himself from the fourth season — which stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as cops investigating a string of deaths in an Alaskan mining town — by tweaking his Instagram bio to read, “True Detective S1-3 (NOT Night Country).”

On Reddit, fans aren’t taking kindly to Pizzolatto’s smack talk.

“I’ll always love S1, but that’s pretty lame of him to crap on the show like that when the season isn’t even halfway over,” one commenter wrote.

Another said Pizzolatto “comes off as very petty and unprofessional.”

True Detective: Night Country, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and Max