True Detective is a gritty, existential detective story, created by writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. From the 1990s to the present day, two detectives struggle with their own demons as they pursue a serial killer cult who seem entirely at peace with theirs.
Beginning with a cruel, ritual killing in 1995 Louisiana, the story spends six episodes working primarily in flashback, as former State Police Detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are interviewed by younger detectives who seem intent on uncovering a truth that will reveal Cohle as the killer. In the final two episodes, with the past section wrapped up, the series concludes with Cohle and Hart's personal quest to finally get their guy.
Cohle (McConaughey) is a buttoned-down struggling alcoholic who lost his daughter in an accident and subsequently his marriage. His fellow officers call him the Tax Man on account of the ledger he uses in lieu of a regular notebook and his aggressive, nihilistic atheism endears him to no-one in Louisiana. Hart (Harrelson) is a family man with anger issues and a self-destructive sexual obsession with women who resemble his wife. Everyone else in the series is pretty much some form of cipher. The story is told through the two central characters, and thus they are the only characters of substance, with the rest of the world existing only as they perceive it.
The central mystery is as much a psychological quest as it is a police procedural, with the killer less a criminal and more a manifestation of the dark-halves of Cohle and Hart's personae. It is perhaps notable that the last two episodes contain the only scenes which have neither Cohle nor Hart in them, and that these scenes all feature the killer, making him the only other 'real' character in the film. The investigation is in some ways secondary to the clash between Cohle's grim worldview and Hart's equally destructive laissez faire attitude. In many ways, the series is the psychological and philosophical core of the buddy cop genre laid bare and stripped of all the extraneous fripperies of slapstick humour and bonding.
"The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door."
The transformation of the two leads between their 1995 and 2012 incarnations is truly extraordinary. Young Cohle is lean, smart and formal, while the older version is a wreck of a man with straggling grey hair. Hart goes the other way, from moderately slobbish to dressed and pressed. I spent the best part of an episode wondering if the younger versions weren't lip-synching body-doubles.
The ending of the series is in some ways bleak, with the realisation that most of the people who were involved in the murders will never be brought to justice, but viewed as an existential journey it is also uplifting. Future seasons are slated to focus on completely different characters, and that feels like the right choice.
If I have a criticism of the series it is that the absolute focus on two male protagonists and a male antagonist resulted in a show in which women lacked agency, and I would like to see at least a female protagonist in season two, not least because it would be different and the format of the show demands different if it is not to simply repeat with a change of clothes. It would not be possible to make another season about Cohle and Hart, at least not without spoiling everything that made True Detective unique, and the risk is of making a season that is about Cohle and Hart with the serial numbers filed off.
"...once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning."
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