Albert Kim was at a loss. It was August 2020, and the creators of the beloved Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, had just dropped out of the Netflix live-action adaptation, leaving him the sole showrunner.

“I was very concerned,” Kim tells Inverse. “I wasn’t quite sure that the show could continue without them.”

It was a sentiment shared by a fandom that had been burned by a live-action adaptation before. The last time was M. Night Shyamalan’s abysmal feature film The Last Airbender, a critical and box-office bomb that most fans refuse to even speak of. But when Netflix announced its live-action TV series adaptation in 2018, fans let themselves get excited again.

True Detective: Night Country is the latest in a long legacy of the True Detective anthology series, but it tied itself to Season 1 specifically. The first season of the series made a huge splash, redefining the murder mystery genre and showing the abilities of the HBO miniseries.

But now that the fourth season has come and gone, it’s still unclear just why all these connections were made. In conversation with Inverse’s Hoai-Tran Bui, showrunner Issa López broke down just what all these connections mean and why they were added into the cold tundra of Ennis, Alaska.