Over the course of eight episodes last year, True Detective was electrifying. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto's show was an enthralling, suspenseful and baffling yarn, sprawling across the bayous of Louisiana and gathering more viewers each week.Replicating that critical and popular success was never going to be easy, but early reviews of True Detective's second season haven't been kind.Season Two is a decidedly dour affair. It's murky, stoic, and its focus on issues of masculinity - impotence, fatherhood, abandonment, weakness - feels less nuanced than last year's pursuits. However, that may be missing the point altogether.Though it bears the same title, this season of True Detective cements the show as an out-an-out anthology series, loosely connected by the crime genre but otherwise independent, for better or worse.Instead of a central partnership, the second season adds a few more main characters to the story, which takes place in and around Vinci, a town based on tiny and notoriously corrupt Vernon, California.Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn) is a former small-time gangster gone legit, lining up a business deal to get in on a large tract of land that the California government will pay handily for when constructing high-speed rail. Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) is a haggard shell of a man drinking away the tatters of his failed marriage, and firmly in Semyon's pocket. Antigone "Ani" Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) is the heavy, a no-nonsense Ventura county sheriff and daughter of a hippie guru who takes shit from no one. And Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) is a war veteran and Highway Patrol officer put on administrative leave after an incident with an actress where he may or may not have received oral sex in exchange for excusing some dangerous driving. All of these seemingly disparate but equally miserable souls come into each other's orbit when Vinci's city manager, Ben Caspere, a man with some brazen sexual proclivities, goes missing.Pizzolatto has chosen to focus this season not on the spiralling mystery of a murder spree, but on the futility of applying law and order to a thoroughly corrupt city. Part of the thrill of the first season's Louisiana setting was that the milieu had been so underused in crime-drama TV. Transplanting the show to Los Angeles trades pastoral dread for the well-trod sprawl that captured detective writers like Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. Even so, there's unease aplenty; the second season has an Eyes Wide Shut meets Mulholland Drive feel to it, and its occasional surrealism apes Twin Peaks .But that combination of Lynchian tone and pulp-novel plot proves to be a struggle for Pizzolatto, and the new season is weighted down by an obsession with masculinity and phallic imagery. True Detective Season 2 is screened on M-Net Edge, Channel 113 at 22:00..