No need to dig up the old casefiles: If youve watched virtually any hour-long TV dramas in the past half-decade, True Detectives M.O. definitely fits a pattern. Southern Gothic atmosphere. Recession economics. Middle-aged white male antiheroes who smoke, drink, talk, and fuck inappropriately. Murders involving antlers, the on-trend accessory for todays discerning serial killer. Even its relatively novel formatits an eight-episode story written and directed in its entirety by Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga respectivelyis only relatively novel: It shares its new-story-every-season anthology format with American Horror Story. And given its odd couple of cops track a ritualistic serial killer in a dying Louisiana town premise, it may as well share that title, too.
True Detective and 60 More Reasons to Love 2014
At first glance, the only thing that truly distinguishes True Detective is its cast, specifically its two movie-star leads, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. McConaughey comes to the small screen in the middle of his Dallas Buyers Club/Wolf of Wall Street hot streak; Harrelson returns as a veteran of HBOs Game Change and, of course, creator of his eponymous character on Cheersan all-time great TV comedy performance whose country-boy good-naturedness hes been busy inverting ever since Natural Born Killers. And given both actors nearly identical public images as genial Texas tokers, the big task of True Detectives premiere is simply to tell their two characters apart.
Turns out thats easy enough: Harrelsons Detective Marty Hart and McConaugheys Detective Rust Cohle arent so much good cop/bad cop as normal cop/sad cop. Lets start with Cohle: Hes a pill-popping alcoholic insomniac whose fellow cops hate him because they believe he worked for internal affairs. He has an apartment with no furniture except a mattress on the floor and a stack of books about murder, and he keeps a crucifix on the wall not because hes a Christian but because he finds solace in contemplating how Jesus surrendered himself to be slowly executed. When he finally opens up to his partner, its to deliver morose soliloquies about how the entire world is all one ghetto, mana giant gutter in outer space, and how mankinds best bet is to collectively stop reproducing and volunteer for extinction. He has no family, because his wife left him after their daughter died. For crying out loud, his name is Rust Cohlehes named after metal corrosion and the fossil fuel that causes miners lung. Harrelsons character could spend the entire episode in the midst of an uncontrollable crying jag and hed still seem cheery by comparison.
Yet while his character is not exactly Mister Sunshine, Harrelsons Hart is indeed painted as a basically okay guy. For one thing, hes the shows primary method of self-critique, constantly and amusingly mocking Rusts gloomy pronouncements while begging him to knock it off: Stop sayin odd shit, like you smell a psychos fear, like youre in someones faded memory of a town.' The dynamics like a dad deflating the newfound pretensions of his college-kid son during the boys first Thanksgiving visit back home.
But Harts got obvious sympathy for Cohle, even if unlike his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), who finds out right away he has no idea what happened in Cohles life to make him a sympathetic figure in the first place. He repeatedly defends Rusts skills and intelligence to other cops, both in the present-day framing sequence and on that first day of the big ritual-murder case, where he could just as easily have encouraged his boss to nudge Cohle off the case. When Rust shows up to Marty and Maggies house drunk for a getting-to-know-you dinner, Marty reacts to the revelation of his partners alcoholism with gentleness, setting up a face-saving ride home from another cop (even if he looks pretty pissed when Rust winds up sticking around).
Ultimately, its Harrelsons jut-jowled, mumble-mouthed, hangdog performance that gives Marty Hart his heft, just as its McConaugheys terseness that makes Rust so interesting to watch. The big moment here comes when Marty and Rust get their first look at the elaborately posed murder victim at the center of the season, a part-time prostitute named Dora Lang who, in Harts memorable description, is drugged, bound, tortured with a knife, strangled, posed out there in a field wearing a crown of thorns and antlers. Both men steel themselves for whats to come, you can see it on their faces and read it in their body language, but Hart actually looks sad. You can see this sight take something out of him, deflate the balloon of his spirit ever so slightly. Cohle, by contrast, buries himself in note-taking, theory-spouting, and eventually philosophizing he turns the killing into a very precise, very depressing series of thoughts and statements. Rust seems to just get wound up more and more tightly with each horror he encounters; Marty sags and expands under the weight of it all, as if to ooze away from it. Their present-day incarnations Rust a sarcastic, rough-looking outsider who drinks beer by the sixpack, Marty a glad-handling P.I. who seems to have mastered the system by refusing to get too worked up by it both seem like logical conclusions to the journeys we seem them begin here.
Is it enough to set True Detective apart from the ever-expanding squad of grim-and-gritty cop/killer dramas? That case isnt yet closed, though theres plenty of cause for optimism. The presence of two of The Wires most fun performers, Clarke Lester Freamon Peters and Michael Brother Mouzone Potts, almost automatically makes for good television. Monaghans not given much to do yet but be oblivious, but Martys affair with a clerk (Alexandria Daddario) is so comically obvious that it may mean the show plans on doing something a bit livelier than the usual cheatin-hearts shtick with that relationship. And theres something promising about the shows pacing so far, too, the way its cuts between the original case in the 90s and the characters memories of it in 2012 allows it to speed up and slow down various revelations depending on the needs of the moment. A little luck, a little legwork, and who knows we may have caught a good one here.