The fourth season of True Detective, HBO’s acclaimed crime series, takes an especially chilling turn, one that extends to its very environment. Rather than the American South or California like previous seasons, True Detective season 4 is set in Alaska, though it wasn’t entirely filmed there.
True Detective season 4, with the new subtitle Night Country, takes place in the fictional small town of Ennis, Alaska. When the personnel at a nearby research station go missing, police officers Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro work together to find the missing scientists only to be faced with a much more sinister mystery. Filmed on location, here is where the relentlessly frozen landscapes for True Detective: Night Country were actually shot.
Where True Detective: Night Country Was Filmed
Though set in Alaska, True Detective: Night Country was primarily filmed in Iceland, with season showrunner and director Issa López, and producer Mary Jo Winkler, revealing that principal photography lasted eight months on location. López explained that production in Iceland lasted 120 days, 49 of which involved filming at night to capture the immense and atmospheric darkness in the region. To maintain a sense of verisimilitude with its Alaskan setting, production designer Daniel Taylor and costume designer Alex Bovaird visited Alaska to observe and research the environment when creating the town of Ennis and its inhabitants.
Additional on-location filming was completed around Nome, Alaska, one of the inspirations behind the fictional town of Ennis. Principal photography began in November 2022 and lasted until April 2023, including the coldest months of the year in the region, with temperatures on set occasionally dropping as low as -9°F. Though expecting frigid shooting conditions, López admitted there was nothing that could quite prepare the cast and crew for that level of cold.
Taking advantage of this unique landscape, much of True Detective: Night Country features sweeping exterior scenes in the unforgiving winter, which plays directly into the story as the mystery takes a gruesome turn. Compared to the sweltering humidity of the first True Detective season’s setting of the Louisiana bayou, Night Country feels like a geographic inverse, trading out swamplands for vast tundras. True Detective: Night Country might not have been filmed in primarily in Alaska, but its Icelandic filming location makes for a strong substitute.
