re: Deep State Part 2: Hollywood:The spell they cast.. (pg16 Epstein = Eyes Wide Shut)

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True Detective season 3’s first two episodes ramp up the satanic panic 2 Mahershala Ali headlines the time-jumping new season from Nic Pizzolatto
By Lindsey Romain Jan 2, 2019, 10:01am EST

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Nov. 7, 1980: “The day Steve McQueen died.” It was a full-moon night, the week after Halloween, when the town of West Fingers, Arkansas, changed forever. Two children were missing, and the sleepy Ozark community was irrevocably contorted; once an innocuous spot of brown country, it would now be the site of an infamous crime of duplicitous origin. Who was involved? A group of metal-obsessed teens? The kids’ uncle? A local pedophile? Or was there something darker at play in West Fingers, something that — decades later — is still spinning its web of evil?

That’s the basic setup for the third season of True Detective, HBO’s gritty noir anthology series from creator (and occasional internet punching bag) Nic Pizzolatto. The first season, directed by Cary Fukunaga (Maniac) with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as leads, was a masterpiece of weird fiction, a Lovecraftian horror fable about a seedy underground pedophile ring protected by local systems. Though the second season diverged from the promise of the first — favoring corrupt police and crime syndicates over the first’s occultist obsession — it didn’t sour all the goodwill. The third season, which premieres on Jan. 13 after a nearly three-year hiatus, has been hyped thanks in part to the inclusion of Deadwood creator David Milch, Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier, and Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali in the lead role.

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Wisely, season 3 orients itself with one of the more famous real crimes in modern America: the West Memphis Three case, in which three teenage boys were arrested for the murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas, in the early 1990s. In that case, the convicted teenagers were heavy metal- and horror-obsessed boys who rebelled against the norms of a fundamentalist community — and were severely and erroneously persecuted for it.

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The West Memphis Three were associated with a phenomenon known as the “satanic panic,” a widespread, fear-mongering hysteria that spread through the U.S. in the 1980s, in which authorities targeted schools and day-care centers with accusations of ritual-based abuse, sacrifice, and child prostitution. Season 1 dabbled in satanic panic with its Light of the Way preschool cult, and it looks like season 3 is on a similar route. In addition to the West Memphis Three allusions, the episodes also pepper in references to the “Franklin case” — another real-life conspiracy theory about an alleged child prostitution ring in Omaha, Nebraska, that’s commonly associated with the satanic panic craze.

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