The Invisible Counterpoint

True Detective Emily Nussbaum wrote: Two weeks ago, I published  a critical article about HBO’s “True Detective”  in which I argued that, as stylish and as well acted as the series was, it had a hollow center. Beneath its auteurist trappings, the show boiled down to bickering cops hunting a sinister “rape club”—a plot that has been done to death, so to speak, on many better shows. “True Detective” also had a funky gender problem: it was about the evil of men who treat women as lurid props, but the show treated women as lurid props. And, though the dialogue was deeply, sometimes deadly serious, those layers of Lovecraft and nihilism just felt like red herrings. […] There was a hospital scene between Marty and his wife and kids that was so abstract, it might as well have featured a silent-movie card reading “Forgiven!” And, over the show’s last twenty minutes, as in the finale of “Lost,” the series became a meditation on how our heroes heale...

Karen Weese wrote this: Nicole Larson was the kind of person whose smile always made you want to smile back. It was only after a while that it struck you: She always smiled with her mouth closed. It had been six years since Nicole last sat in a dentist’s chair, seven since her last full exam or X-rays. Childhood dental visits had been rare: Her parents’ low-wage jobs never had insurance, and after paying for rent and heat and food, there was rarely much left. As an adult, she worked long hours as a waitress and hotel housekeeper, but those jobs lacked insurance, too, and the meager pay always ran out before the month did. So Nicole learned to white-knuckle it through toothaches, popping handfuls of ibuprofen. She brushed constantly, rinsing with every oral rinse the drugstore sold. And she perfected a dimpled, twinkle-in-the-eye smile that always got a smile in return … but didn’t require her to open her mouth. But today all that was about to change. She had landed a new job — s...