Far From Any Road: The Dark Byways of True Detective

A bit late to the party, not being part of the initial rabid throng that crashed HBO GO the night of the season finale, but I was finally able to wrap-up True Detective.

Wow. This is pretty spectacular viewing. As tremendous as the pilot was, there was some similar antler imagery to NBC’s Hannibal that caused me to wait a bit before diving back in – and I’m glad I did, because the similarities ended there. The opening credits are probably the most hypnotic since Dexter along with a theme song from The Handsome Family (from their 2003 album Singing Bones) and music producer T Bone Burnette that is simply astonishing.

Created by writer Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga (all 8 episodes), True Detective follows police detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) during a 17-year hunt for a Louisiana serial killer. Episodes jump from their discovery of a killing in 1995 to bookend interviews of them in 2012 - two very different men, time has clearly not been kind to. 

The cast is one of the strongest parts of this show, without a doubt, with McConaughey dominating on all fronts. His performance is nothing short of spectacular. With this and Dallas Buyers Club heel-to-heel, he’s pretty firmly established himself as one of the strongest actors working today. Cohle (and sometimes the series itself) takes his nihilism to such an extreme degree that his detached profundity could easily come off as pretentious. Any other actor would have likely stepped on the line (given the script) and made Cohle unbearable. He and Harrelson take turns being hard to get behind and identify with – you want to like Harrelson, but his lapses in judgment quickly send you back over to McConaughey’s side of the fence. But the riddle that torments them is far thornier than their respective failings and you keep rooting for them to fix their frayed ropes and get back on the road that leads to…well, that I am not about to say. Thanks to this unforgettable case and the phenomenal work of director Cary Fukunaga, the show absolutely fascinates and makes you step ever deeper into the shadows as the story progresses. By the 4^th episode in, there’s no turning back.

This is a pretty amazing time to be a noir crime fan, across many mediums. Thomas Harris, Steig Larsson, Wallander, Luther, The Killing, The Bridge – not since Dashiell Hammett has the trend of dark doings and those who seek to unravel them been so on fire.

True Detective makes use of a lot of genre tropes, often to very successful ends. If the show has a failing, it’s the layering of such a complex and baroque narrative, with some plot threads that never really manifest, despite some heaving positioning. There are moments that evoke Silence of the Lambs and Kiss the Girls more than I might have wished at times, but True Detective stands tall as one of the most compelling and unmissable crime dramas in years. Its strengths far outweigh its shortcomings. I suspect you’ll want to go right back to the first episode and watch it all again for clues and shadings that might have been missed on that first pass. I know I’m going to be trying to.

True Detective (like American Horror Story) aims to be a bit of an anthology series – so we’ll likely have a clean slate of characters in season 2, which Pizzolatto teases will be about the secret occult history of the United States transportation system. Something tells me any map to that story is going to leave a lot of ink on our fingers. If you haven’t seen True Detective yet, turn out the lights and take a deep breath - it's unforgettable - and while the darkness may leave you with an extreme reaction, you absolutely should not miss it.