And why would Freddie be so concerned with what color shirt Na
What should they have done? Write Detective Box as a female just to balance out the male:female ratio? Really it seems like your only legit gripe is that Chandra was a head scratching character that made some really stupid decisions. I could argue that Nas made just as many stupid decisions though. Matter of fact he was worse. Neck tattoos, drugs, murder assist all in a matter of weeks. The rest of the female characters mentioned all filled their roles exactly as needed for the plot. Why would you want to develop characters that don't need to be developed just for the sake of being PC? Screw that.
No, I don't give a crap how many female characters there are, or whether they are "good guys" or "bad guys" or if they're strong independent role models, or anything of that nature. Don't give a crap. It's an artist's vision of a story, and if the story is just about guys, then that's not a knock in my mind at all. A lot of people slagged True Detective 1 for being a boys club, and that they didn't have major female catalysts. I wasn't on board with that criticism at all...the story is what the story is. Maybe there could be a macro case for whether women are represented enough on TV, but that's an argument that doesn't move me much since there is so much TV from so many sources.
This is a different story. The creators put women in this story. And then they were in my mind, either unwilling or unable to write those characters. I have no idea what the writers room looked like...for all I know this was jointly written by 37 NARAL activists...but they did a terrible job on the female characters in this show, and it significantly directly detracted from the end product.
I absolutely agree that Naz as a character was poorly executed and made dumb decisions, right from the first episode. But the thing is, as poorly as they were done, at least they were
explicable. It was ham handed and overbaked at times, in my opinion, but you got the IDEA of why he was doing what he was doing. Yes, stupid to have him tatooing his neck before the trial ended...but at least it was consistent...he was falling into the system, he was finding the family/community he didn't have on the outside, he was embracing that dark part of him that was always there, etc. Was it a dumb way to show it, definitely, but it wasn't out of the blue. It's not like the story had Naz all of a sudden, say, go to the warden and offer to wear a wire on Freddy, or get a job in the kitchen and start poisoning people, because the plot needed it.
And of course, a shoddily done character like Naz is one thing, while you have characters like Stone, Box and Freddie that are quite well done and fully realized.
In my opinion, by NOT giving a sh_t about the female characters, it opened the door to the biggest problems the show ended up with. The out of left field killer, which I think was a major letdown, was only possible because the character of Andrea was so unrealized. Sure, we can make her be having an affair with whoever. We can make her a druggy party slut that's seeing sleeping her financial planner, but sure we can say that she all of a sudden looked at one statement and jumped all over a discrepancy and was ready take him down so he had to kill her but he liked to assault whores anyway so was Andrea a prostitute he was seeing and then he became her money guy or maybe he killed her because all of a sudden she was a forensic accountant and was getting to the bottom of his theft whatever don't worry about it making sense.
And I went over the Chandra stuff. If they even gave the slightest damn about that character, they would not have her acting dumber than a 12 year old who saw one episode of Columbo. Oh, a young lawyer getting her big break on a high profile case that's too big for her? Of course she's smuggling coke up her plumbing and falling in love with a scumbag, because you know, women do that.
All I'm saying, is they wouldn't have say, Stone getting a crush on the prosecutor, and handing her the defense files, because it doesn't fit the character.
I'm not a media social justice warrior as I said, but it was just glaring to me in contrast how poorly they drew up the female characters, which wouldn't even be that big a deal, if not to have those deficiencies totally play out in the endgame of the last couple episodes.