Get ready for your close up, Fayetteville. Turns out, it’s coming a bit sooner than we thought.
According to a teaser trailer released Sunday evening, the upcoming season of HBO’s True Detective recently filmed in Fayetteville will be released just after the first of the year in January.
It had been previously announced that the show would be released sometime in 2019, but it doesn’t get much sooner than January. That’s just four (or five, depending on when exactly the release date falls) away.
Season 3 of crime drama will star Mahershala Ali as state police detective Wayne Hays, and “tells the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks, and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods.”
Filming for the upcoming season of the show, created by University of Arkansas MFA alum Nic Pizzolatto, was just completed earlier this month.
The cast and crew began shooting locally back in February at various locations around Fayetteville and the surrounding region, and Pizzolatto and Ali have said that the city will figure prominently into the plot of the upcoming season.
“It would have been a disservice to the story to not shoot it in the Ozarks, in Fayetteville or in Arkansas,” Ali said. “Because it is such a character in the story. It would have been such a shame if we had shot it any other place.”
Filming took place all over Fayetteville, from Mount Sequoyah, to homes and apartments around the city, to location shoots at local restaurants like Hugo’s, Herman’s, and Bear’s Place. We heard reports of filming in Fort Smith, Mountainburg, Huntsville, Springdale, Devil’s Den, and several other places as well.
“The fog over the mountains, the rivers, the water, the sense of scale when you get out into some of this nature, what the buildings say about the lives behind those buildings,” Pizzolatto said. “Every place we look tells a story about the people that have been there, are there now, and are no longer there. And I feel like that kind of texture and the dimensionality enhances the character and the mystery that drive what we do.
“Everywhere you point the camera here is treasure,” he said. “That’s a real thing.”
The trailer released Sunday night is narrated by Ali, and certainly shows off some of the landscape that Pizzolatto and Ali were talking about. It opens with Ali walking around in the woods somewhere in the region. You also see a glimpse of a couple restaurants, a waterfall, an office, a neighborhood, and a distinctive-looking bridge.
Watch the full trailer above. Anybody recognize any locations so far?
