'True Detective' to return for fifth season

LOS ANGELES

U.S. crime series "True Detective" will return for a fifth season after the recently wrapped up edition - following two women officers in frigid Alaska - proved a hit with viewers, broadcaster HBO has announced.

The series renewal comes despite an online spat with creator Nic Pizzolatto, who took to social media to snipe at his brainchild's new incarnation, reposting criticisms of Sunday's season four finale.

Remarking on Pizzolatto's criticisms, Kali Reis, a co-star of the latest season, said "that's a damn shame" on X, formerly Twitter.

The fifth season will see Issa Lopez return as showrunner, and she has also signed a contract with HBO and Warner Bros. Discovery's Max streaming platform to work on other "exclusive content," the network said in a statement.

It did not confirm who will play the detective duo in the next go around.

The pairing has changed every season since the first breakout edition in 2014, when Matthew McConaughey was partnered with Woody Harrelson.

The latest season to air set Jodie Foster and Reis, an Indigenous actress and pro-boxer, against an unforgiving Alaskan icescape.

"True Detective: Night Country" has been a ratings success, averaging 12.7 million viewers worldwide, the best result for the series since it began, according to HBO.

Foster told AFP that the fourth season was intended to mirror the first.

"The two boys were Louisiana - it's hot, everyone's sweating... It's the intensity of this brutal light. And with us, it was just the opposite: two women, in the dark, in the cold, at the end of the world," she said.

The drama unfolds as they probe the mysterious deaths of eight scientists working on an Arctic research station, while Reis's character is haunted by the unsolved murder of an Indigenous woman.