100 Favorite Shows: #75 — True Detective
“I’m not supposed to be here.”
On January 12, 2014, Nic Pizzolatto debuted a new kind of crime drama for HBO: an anthology miniseries that would center around a different case each season. True Detective, however, went much further than this, as it came with time jumps, tracking shots, and questions of supernatural flavoring. Each season has also come with a different anchoring cast. Season one starred Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Season two boasted Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell. Season three kept it straight with just Mahershala Ali. Equal parts investigative and philosophical,the first season of True Detective captured the interest of viewers for eight glorious weeks.
(Believe it or not, this essay contains spoilers for both True Detective and The Mandalorian.)
Plenty of television series over the years have been fully embraced by the meme culture. The Office is full of iconic reaction gifs. The Mandalorian’s use of Baby Yoda allowed it to take the crown of 2019’s best meme. Even SpongeBob SquarePants sees the origin of a new meme every day. But there might be no show that has ever breathed a bigger sigh of relief when they received the full support of the meme culture than True Detective did back when the first season came to an end in 2014.
When it comes to a detective series, many come into it with the preconception that the mystery is going to be the central focus of the show. “Whodunnit?” has become the biggest question of investigative series and, for many fans, it’s the crux of their interest. True Detective, on the other hand, put the murders in the backseat of its cop cruiser. The focus wasn’t on who did it or even why or how they did it. Instead, the focus was on the detectives (McConaughey as Rust Cohle and Harrelson as Marty Hart) and what the mystery did to them. What did they think when they saw the gruesome mangling of victims’ bodies or when they spent years following nothing but dead ends? The story of the show was always about them and it was almost disinterested with the actual centerpiece crime.
That is why the meme culture was so key. Detective story fans might have been put off by the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion to the murder story. Instead, they embraced the show wholeheartedly, en route to making the first season of True Detective one of the most beloved series of the entire 2010s. They grounded it in the meme culture by showing all the different iconic pop culture pairings who should take on “True Detective season two.” (This included joke suggestions like LeBron James and Kevin Love or George Bailey and Clarence Odbody, as well as serious suggestions like Ewan McGregor and Tom Hardy.) This meant that what resonated for viewers of the show was the characters and the actors portraying them. They weren’t making suggestions for the next murder mystery; they were probing into who the new characters should be. The focus of True Detective’s first season had paid off.
Granted, the first season is the only season of this show that I’ve actually seen. But it was so perfectly constructed and riveting that I had to include it on the list. People do seem to be more in favor of the Ali season than they were of the Vaughn/Farrell affair, but for what it’s worth, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that could top the Harrelson/McConaughey dynamic.
The actors themselves came to the small screen in a major way, showing that the trend of prominent movie stars signing up for a small handful of episodes in a miniseries was the new normal. It was not a fad that would fade; the dam had broken and the movie stars have remained on television ever since. Back then, though, Harrelson and McConaughey steamrolling their way through the cultural conversation and the awards circuit was a big fucking deal! (McConaughey had just won an Oscar and starred in Interstellar that fall, after all.)
Their version of the show took place from 1995 to 2012 and was centered around Rust and Marty investigating Dora Lange’s murder and the subsequent crimes that seemed to orbit Lange’s. This was the plot-centric logline, but as stated above, True Detective (thanks to the genius focus of Pizzolatto, who wrote all eight installments) placed characters over plot. Were Rust’s days with the cartel going to take over the show’s narrative thrust? Should they really be the investigators assigned to this murder seventeen years later? These questions were irrelevant in the face of how the characters failed to balance their personal lives with their debilitating careers. It’s less about “what happened?” versus “how did it affect them?”
Marty and Rust took their buddy cop dynamic a bit further than the tropes we’re used to. There was no good cop/bad cop or straight-laced cop/insane cop. Conversely, neither played by the rules at any turn, with Rust perhaps going a bit further down the path of questionable policework than Marty did. Furthermore, Marty was a horrible example of a family man and Rust often dipped into the territory of being a straight-up philosopher. These kinds of detectives were pretty far from the Dick Wolf variety. They weren’t just flawed; they were broken. In a time when we have to ask ourselves, “Can our society function with any flawed police officer?,” this might not be the most savory idea. For eight weeks in 2014, though, it made for riveting television.
True Detective was a puzzle show done right. If the heavy drama of the characters took up, say, seventy percent of the show’s focus, then the other thirty percent was devoted to teasing information out steadily over time. This was orchestrated masterfully through the show’s framing device of the 2012 versions of Rust and Marty being interrogated regarding their 1995 actions and detective work. This was no procedural. This was a show filled with information that Rust and Marty were already privy to and that we had to be patient to learn about ourselves.
And when, finally, there’s no more information that Rust and Marty have that we don’t already have and the murder is still a mystery, that’s when it became time for the show to take an ambitious leap forward. By the finale, “Form and Void,” we have arrived fully in the present day with these characters. The interrogations are over, the 1990s are tied up with a red, white, and blue-colored bow. It’s time to immerse ourselves in the present day (read: 2012) when — even though Rust and Marty are hardly in the shape to apprehend anyone — the leads have decided to take what they’ve reflected upon and bring about their own twisted sense of justice.
This time leap is such a baller storytelling decision and I have paramount respect for it. In the ’90s sequences, there was undeniable tension, but never as much as there should have been because I always knew that Rust and Marty were going to make it out the other side and still be alive in 2012. But by jumping ahead to the present, we no longer have the framing device of their memories. “Form and Void” was real. Anything could happen and the stakes were ratcheted way up for the characters. We cared about them and, suddenly, we cared that their fates were no longer a certainty. It’s the kind of thing I’ve been rooting for Better Call Saul to do for years now. A chronology shake-up to the unknown is unbelievably riveting and it places the emphasis on a gut emotional feeling for the show, rather than an obsession with the facts and the “plot holes” (which have become the worst form of “criticism”).
That isn’t to say that the ’90s segments couldn’t be filled with visceral segments. They often were! “Who Goes There” has to be the best evidence of that. Rooted around Rust’s old cartel dalliances, the episode builds to one of the most remarkable climaxes in the history of the medium. Rust, on the other side of a gang robbery gone wrong, embarks on a narrow escape maneuver from all sorts of gangs, police officers, and gunfire. The way it’s depicted is in an astonishing six-minute tracking sequence that focuses on Rust trying to wriggle his way out of the life-threatening circumstances he became subjected to in a situation that escalated rapidly. It starts off with the m.o. of “thirty seconds, in and out” and quickly devolves into Rust taking his liaison, Ginger (Joseph Sikora), for a human shield/hostage that requires Marty to arrive as a pick-up in just ninety seconds — with no further explanation. The whole conclusion is filled with all the thrilling force of a five-star wanted level in Grand Theft Auto V, but with vastly more consequential stakes. (Rust can’t just respawn, obviously.)
McConaughey is brilliant in this exploding hot pot of a scene; there’s no denying that. (The narrow focus in his eyes that prevent him from ever looking directly at the child in the house he rescues, lest he be shot dead for diverting his attention, is one of the subtler aspects of an extremely demanding task.) The pinnacle of mastery, however, is all Cary Joji Fukunaga, the series’ full-time director. Not only did Fukunaga set the visual style of the show, but he continuously improved upon it. It was gorgeous and sumptuous. It could range from two cars driving alone at night to the electrifying thrill of a one-take escape. No matter the scene, Fukunaga crafted it with beautiful imagery. (The man has better shot selection than Kevin Durant.) It was the crowning hallmark of True Detective’s never-before-seen form.
Because of how glorious Fukunaga’s visual flair was, True Detective rarely felt the need to tell, instead of show. (Aside from the interrogation sequences, one of the only instances of telling I can think of comes when the worst sort of mutilation/violence is described. And thank god it wasn’t shown. That was the right call for squeamish viewers like me who could barely handle Errol’s dog abuse.) Instead, we see the look on Maggie’s (Michelle Monaghan) face when Marty had one too many affairs. Or we see North by Northwest on Errol’s television. We’re learning about these characters even when it’s not explicit.
Some things need to remain a mystery, right? For as much as we learn about the ins and outs of the case and the psychological warfare at play in Rust’s mind and in Marty’s actions, there’s still plenty of forbidden knowledge. Some things are not meant for the viewer to fully understand. The hallucination in the finale that almost gets Rust killed is not Fukunaga’s or Pizzolatto’s or ours. It’s Rust’s demon to deal with and Rust’s alone.
This element is one of the show’s most distinctively Lovecraftian (or Campbellian if the “Who Goes There” episode title is supposed to be a clue). True Detective never veers into the fantastic or gothic or supernatural, but it isn’t afraid to get weird. We don’t receive the full impact of what Rust and Marty learn on the case because what they learn breaks them. It sends the ripple effect of damaged human beings soaring out into the universe. The kinds of monstrosities they come across are not those for which they are equipped. For us, this awareness is forbidden, as it is in many of Lovecraft’s most famous works. For them, it is just a warning. The further they probe, the more they become Promethean figures or Desdemona archetypes; they’re doomed to suffer for what they have witnessed.
Fortunately, these elements are kept at a six-foot distance for us and they’re never quite able to infect our psyches. Even though Rust and Marty cannot fully become whole again after their 1995 journey through the refracted looking glass, at least they had each other. It’s the most important argument in favor of having detectives partnered up. There may be only trace amounts of love between these two, but they do care for one another because they’re each other’s only tether to understanding the world they’ve been exposed to. (They’ll just never look each other in the eyes and say it.) The trauma they’ve endured over their lives is accessible only to each other. The world is vast and full of horrors, but for Rust, it also has Marty. And for Marty, Rust.
In real life, the normal sorts of things bind people across a lifetime. Familial ties, the bonds of friendship, long-term coworkers. On television, it’s more unpredictable. A plane crash unites the characters of Lost forever. A duplicitous lawyer brings the study group together on Community. But for True Detective, it was this one case. If it wasn’t so all-consuming, maybe Rust and Marty would’ve parted as affable colleagues. Instead, they were partners against the parts of Hell that have run rampant on Earth. Tragically, they’ll never be able to outlive the evil, but they did manage to ward it off. If only for a little while.
