I’ve been living in New Orleans my entire life, so I really have not had much outsider’s perspective to allow me to truly appreciate my home. I thought it was just another city with a unique downtown area, but not much more than that. Then I landed an extra role on HBO’s recently concluded True Detective. I was initially hesitant about the quality of the show due to the usually typecast actors, the beyond cliche name, a first-time writer, and the general rule that New Orleans has been getting less lauded show and movie contracts. It had so much going against it on paper, but I was wrong on every level.
I got the feeling that this was something great after watching 2 episodes. Of course, I knew I may have been biased since it was a show I was minutely involved in, but any forums I checked backed up that it wasn’t just that.
I started noticing all of these places in my everyday life popping up in the show, only re-envisioned and dramatized transform the mundane into dark, drab, or mysterious. It was almost funny to me, my old under-age drinking spots are now immortalized.
I began to realize how unique my hometown actually is. It’s a place where buildings are abandoned then re-purposed for decades at a time, enveloping vegetation and slow decay become a trademark in some respects, a nearly mile-long street can be made up solely of bars and clubs, and a region of about 400,000 people happen to know each other through no more than three connections. It is a giant small town.
So here is a little view of what True Detective portrays compared to the real world. I took these shots over the span of the show’s run, and most of them were within two miles of my house. I may take more eventually (including the infamous Carcosa), but, for now, this is a small glimpse into a much more honest portrayal of a fictional serial killer’s stomping ground.
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This blog post was written by Ryan Callegari and the photos were taken from Ryan’s post on Reddit. Check his post As promised, here is my collection of True Detective scene location shots! for many more photos.
Episode 3 – the steel and wood bridge where detectives met the Cajun crab trapper to get a lead. Lake Judge Perez and Hermitage Lake, by the fire station at the end of a long road that cuts off of River Road on the west side of the River, below Belle Chase.