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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses True Detective: Night Country (HBO, 2024) as eco-noir storytelling in the Arctic, where nature acts as a narrative agent. It examines how the series depicts the climate crisis as a lived, haunting entanglement using ecocinema and ecofeminism.

Paper long abstract

Set in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, True Detective: Night Country (HBO, 2024) is an American anthology crime drama that situates human drama within a landscape of perpetual night, melting ice, and extractive industry. The narrative unfolds through the investigation of the disappearance of eight men from a polar night research station and unveils insidious connections to the unsolved murder of an Iñupiaq activist and a polluting mining company. The show also serves as a contemporary example of ecocinema and eco-noir, where narrative form, setting, and atmosphere are inseparable from the ecological crisis of the Arctic.

Within this framework, this paper probes the series’ engagement with climate change discourse and narrative ecologies by examining how it presents the Arctic as a “sentient landscape” that blurs boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead. From a feminist ecocritical perspective, Night Country is distinctive for centring women detectives whose investigation is entangled with ecological collapse and community memory. Their search for truth becomes inseparable from a reckoning with the land itself.

The paper draws on ecocinema theory, ecofeminism and critical discourse analysis to elucidate how visual and sonic strategies, darkness, icy soundscapes, and lingering shots of frozen bodies construct an “eco-noir” aesthetic that renders climate change as a lived, haunting entanglement rather than an abstract threat. Ultimately, the paper argues that popular television can serve as a vital site of ecological storytelling.