What made the first season of True Detective delightful was its sense of coming out of nowhere with something unexpected. No pretension, no weight of expectation. Sure, some of the dialogue was out there, but the unexpectedly great Matthew McConaughey delivered even the strangest dialogue.

Under the heavy weight of expectation, the second season has been bogged down in a convoluted mess pushed further into laughable territory by the presence of Vince Vaughn. I suppose he and his handlers expected a career boost or surge along the same lines as McConaughey – maybe we had all been underestimating Vaughn all these years and he had just never been given a role that allowed him to sink his teeth in. McConaughey had been perceived for many years as a one-trick pony too even though much of his long career is studded with hidden gem performances, the likes of which do not fill out Vaughn’s resume.

Every scene with Vaughn was eye rolling. The script was not great to start with – he was asked to pull off some babble that no one would ever say. But a greater actor might have been able to do it without the viewer feeling the need to laugh. And the constant lingering of Vaughn’s character’s wife (played by British actress Kelly Reilly)… what was that all about? Throughout I was expecting that maybe she would play some larger role in the end game – otherwise what other point does her constant presence and artificial brooding play? If it was just to try to humanize Vaughn’s character, it didn’t work. Their conversation is so stilted, so fake, so forced. It looks like two people who joined an “intro to acting” course at a community college and are just fumbling their way through their first scene together. NO chemistry. And hilariously in the finale, Reilly states, “You can’t act for shit. Take it from me.” Haha. Guess what? Neither one of you can act, and the script sucks!

The season ended, and those questions about her role were not answered. What purpose did Vaughn’s wife really serve other than perhaps being some kind of glorified nanny/part-time mum for Rachel McAdams’s kid? Even if the plot questions were more or less answered, the bigger question – what was the point of any of this? – was not.

The end did not satisfy and ended up being just as stupid as the rest of the seven episodes preceding its unceremonious fizzling out.