Time may be a flat circle, but enough has rotated that some of the lustre has left True Detective. HBO’s prestige procedural felt dazzling on-screen – spanning 17 years, a meaty, two-hander between damaged, driven cop Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and his self-righteous, self-deluding partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) against the pungent backdrop of the Louisiana bayou. Cohle and Hart did not banter over corndogs like Starsky and Hutch. Instead, there were fractious arguments in a suffocating car. Whenever Cohle embarked on another nihilistic monologue about the nature of evil, Hart looked about ready to snap off the steering wheel.
Things were just as interesting behind-the-scenes. Created and written by the relatively unknown Nic Pizzolatto, and with all eight episodes directed by Cary Fukunaga, True Detective felt both unusually focused in its aesthetic vision and impressively sustained in its execution, right up until the divisive finale. Yet it was mostly overlooked at the Emmys, and even among its many admirers, there is a growing feeling that it was so bro-focused, there was very little left for its few female characters to do except complain or get naked.
But for a couple of months in early 2014, it felt like the whole world was unhealthily preoccupied with the show, and deliberately or not, it made detectives of us all, establishing a worldwide cult of mini Cohles. It was that rare serial killer story that favoured strangeness over gore, and theorising about how the ritualistic murder of teenager Dora Lange in 1995 related to Cohle and Hart’s brittle video depositions in 2012 became a global meta-game. Even if you weren’t actively Googling “Yellow King” or immersing yourself in far-flung fan hypotheses, there was a rare enjoyment in simply witnessing detailed investigation by proxy, the same sort of prickly pleasure that can be gleaned from David Fincher’s Zodiac or even the Serial podcast, which seems to have superseded True Detective as culture’s pre-eminent crime obsession.
This first incarnation of True Detective was a limited engagement – McConaughey and Harrelson weren’t required to return for a second season, which implied all sorts of unpleasant ways it could wrap up. The actual finale, which was both violent and surprisingly sentimental, tied things off with an unexpected neatness, even if some of the broader mysteries remained unexplained. For some, the result was underwhelming, or frustratingly rote when the rest of the show had bent familiar tropes into intriguing new shapes. (The fact that the near-mythic Carcosa was revealed to be an overgrown catacomb that looked like a nightmarish Crystal Maze zone probably didn’t help.)
But True Detective retains an odd power, a way of lazily coiling around you before pulling tight. Cohle’s unsettling flights into conscious phantasmagoria – the brain-altering hangover of his heavy drug use – are used sparingly, and become even more affecting for their rarity. It’s a great example of Fukunaga’s controlled direction, which feels downright languorous in the early running but finds a whole new gear at the celebrated climax of episode four. Cohle reactivates an old undercover identity with a sketchy biker gang and collars a key witness during a poorly conceived night-time heist in hostile territory. Shot in one astonishing extended take, it makes the period setting seem tangibly immediate and turbo-charges the back half of the season. It’s also the most impressive TV sequence of the past decade, a towering achievement that season two – already the subject of as much equally intense speculation as the identity of the green-eared “spaghetti monster” – will struggle to match.
