The MVP: Vince Vaughn’s Turn in True Detective Season 2 Was the Perfect Choice for a Man in Search of Control

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The MVP, a column where we celebrate the best performances TV has to offer. Whether it be through heart-wrenching outbursts, powerful looks, or perfectly-timed comedy, TV’s most memorable moments are made by the medium’s greatest players—top-billed or otherwise. Join us as we dive deep on our favorite TV performances, past and present:

Which way, Vince Vaughn? The poster boy of turn-of-the-millennium comedies—Swingers, Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers—split his roles between outlandish comic turns and put-upon straight men, and was pretty great at both of them. These R-rated romps were male-skewing, immature, sometimes with a touch of welcome absurdity, but they seeped into the movie-going culture with such ease; thanks to their near-universal appeal (easy, low-brow laughs done by skilled performers), they showed longevity throughout the boom of HD home video and streaming. 

But they don’t make those unsophisticated comedies anymore, or, at least, not in the same way anymore (Vaughn has some thoughts on why); what felt like easy charm in the 2000s felt hokey and lazy in the 2010s. Every time one of Vaugn’s early-2010s comedies tried to balance the schmaltzy sentimentality with rude comedy, it came across as tired—go on, tell us that Vaughn’s blank expression and half-hearted shrug on the Delivery Man poster actually sells you on watching the movie. The last Vince Vaughn comedy to rake in more than $100 million at the box office was Couples Retreat fifteen years ago.

But back to our opening question: as Hollywood neglected Vaughn’s aptitude for flitting between zany, oafish supporting parts and schlubby but sincere straight men, the actor was faced with new opportunities in the bloom of the Prestige TV age. Television was becoming the buzzy, laudable, and urgent stomping-ground for artists disillusioned with the limitations of Hollywood, with tons of self-serious dramatic roles available to whoever had something to prove. In many ways, the casting of Vince Vaughn as a gangster struggling to go straight in True Detective Season 2 is the archetype for performers itching for a comeback.

There are many contested explanations of when the “Prestige TV” golden age kicked off, but it was definitely underway when True Detective Season 1 aired in January 2014. Still, the Southern Gothic mystery that debuted the ambitious anthology series felt like a turning point; it had blockbuster-level hype, careful cinematic craft, and two big movie star leads (one of whom had not been a main cast member on TV since Cheers). Detective procedurals of this psychological caliber were rare: networks wanted to replicate it; actors wanted to be a part of it. 16 months after the first season, the Los Angeles-set gritty noir Season 2 premiered, where Vaughn’s gangster gets mixed up in the detective work of Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch.

The sophomore outing of True Detective is the black sheep of the series. Rolling out eight hours of detective antics on the same scale and quality as the explosively successful McConaughey and Harrelson season on such a short turnaround proved too difficult for lone-wolf showrunner and writer Nic Pizzolatto (joined in two episodes by co-writer Scott Lasser). The eight episodes looked worse, were more confusing, and generally irritated a lot of viewers, and the show took a four year hiatus until the more deserving Season 3. 

But even though it collapses into utter confusion in the final two episodes, much of what’s good and bad about Season 2 is intact in the more lauded seasons: a thesis about how the best detective work is done by people with frayed, unstable psyches, and that systems are ill-fitted and unwilling to accept the truths that are uncovered. These threads are not only intact in Season 2, they’re the boldest they’ve ever been—and True Detective has never been a show to prioritize subtlety. There’s a messiness to the story that feels appropriate to the layered, tangled expanse of LA within which characters cross paths—after all, this is the most central and populous setting for any of the four True Detective seasons. 

At times, Farrell makes us imagine a washed-up, self-loathing version of Sonny Crockett, his cool-as-ice Miami Vice character; Rachel McAdams is right at home with her character’s bitter, cynical view of LA crime; Taylor Kitsch is recompensed for the starring roles in flop movies he got after Friday Night Lights with a repressed, tight-jawed motorcycle cop character that sees him delivering the best performance of his career.

But Vince Vaughn is the true MVP of the troubled miniseries entry. He plays Frank Semyon, a former crime lord turned straight and in the middle of landing a lucrative land development deal alongside a proposed hyperspeed railway in California. Going legit is the only thing on his mind, even distracting him from IVF treatment with his wife Jordan (Kelly Reilly)

$5 million of his investment cash goes missing with his associate Ben Caspere, and when Caspere turns up murdered and mutilated, the three aforementioned cops get involved. Two investigations happen concurrently; the above-board detectives looking into corruption and conspiracy, and Frank’s descent back into underworld violence to find out who put his life’s work at risk. There’s a grim irony to Frank reentering the criminal world—he’s getting his hands dirty in order to make them clean again.

Vaughn is not a menacing performer, but his imposing frame and low-key handsomeness sells him as an ambitious entrepreneur who’s painted over everything unappealing about his character. Frank has a higher pitch voice than his criminal cohorts, and there’s a restless physicality when he’s facing off investors and club-owning rivals. Whenever Frank has to get messy, you can feel the strain in Vaughn’s voice as he reaches for the effortless force and cruelty associated with burned-out violent gangsters, and that strain becomes a dramatic tension. Has Frank so completely changed since going straight that he can’t be the man he once was? Was he ever truly threatening, or has he always felt out of place? 

You can’t help but read into Vaughn’s career timeline as he channels his energy into Frank Semyon: an actor trying to be taken seriously suits a character who is demanding to be taken seriously. Vaughn’s casting and performance is a clear antecedent to Chris Rock’s turn as Loy Cannon, the Kansas City crime boss with steadfast entrepreneurial ambitions in Fargo Season 4. Both Rock and Vaughn are not naturals at criminal or dramatic roles, and you can hear their effort in every line and grimace when their character tries to feel 10 feet tall—but that strain enhances the projection and insecurity baked into their characters, even if these shades weren’t that bold on the page.

Frank and the cops’ storylines would never intersect were it not for Raymond Velcoro (Farrell), a dirty cop that’s been in Frank’s pocket ever since Frank found the man who raped Ray’s wife and let him kill him. As he works alongside Ani Bezzerides (McAdams) and Paul Woodrugh (Kitsch), his habit of substance abuse and police corruption loosens its grip, and he’s guided by a sturdier sense of justice and self-control—which alters his relationship with Frank. In the first episode, Frank addresses Ray across a table in a dingy bar, where Ray is handed glasses of liquor and Frank coolly steers him wherever he wants him; by Episode 6, a slick-haired, alert Ray is threatening Frank to confess he set him to kill the wrong man. Power defines Frank’s arc, and Vaughn is given the opportunity to show the character’s shaky relationship with self-determination and agency in big setpieces and intimate settings alike.

Like every character in the show, Frank’s past has determined his future, with abuse he experienced as a child controlling just how willing he is to accept that his enemies have the upper hand. All three male leads (Semyon, Velcoro, and Woodrugh) are dead by the end of Episode 8, battling their demons to the last and never really overcoming them. Before Frank high-tails it out of Los Angeles, he just can’t help having the final word, burning down his rival’s clubs and getting fatally stabbed after he surrenders his last dollar. 

As Frank walks across a flat desert, trailing spots of blood with every shuffled step, he imagines the people he’s been trying to run away from and the face of the wife he’s now trying to reach. The line of red behind him leaves a map, as straight as an arrow, that will lead directly to his corpse, and it may have been plotted out since he was a child. In Frank’s final moments, True Detective Season 2 concludes its fatalistic themes: Los Angeles has such a storied, inflexible history that our fate may have been sealed from our earliest moments. The strain that’s so central to Frank Semyon is that of a man trying to break free of destiny. Vaugn would go on to star in grindhouse thrillers (Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete), a tested Florida Keys detective (Bad Monkey), and even a teenage girl in a serial killer’s body (Freaky); it’s clear Frank Semyon was his attempt to break free of something too.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.