10 years ago, True Detective perfected the TV anthology

As the fourth season divides fans, I look back at the widely acclaimed first season and examine what made it so special.

“Touch darkness and darkness touches you back.” Such is the tagline for True Detective’s first season, drawing clear parallels to Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote about the consequences of staring into the abyss. Nietzsche is just one of the many philosophers from which the season’s ideology draws from, and he is also responsible for the show’s most recognizable quote. “Time is a flat circle” is a line first uttered by a handcuffed Reggie Ledoux as he mused about Carcosa, and it’s later embraced by self-proclaimed nihilist Rust Cohle. Derived from Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence, the concept of time repeating itself wasn’t just included as a chilling line, but it’s exemplary of the season’s time-hopping structure and the dark philosophy of its characters.

The lasting legacy of True Detective is an odd one. On one hand, its debut season came out swinging, with critics immediately recognizing it as a tour de force. It had the lasting impact of influencing many of the dark crime series series that much of this era of “prestige TV” is built upon, and the star power of McConaughey and Harrelson reinforcing the possibility that movie stars could thrive on the small screen. However, its reputation has since been tainted by the incredibly up-and-down results of the later seasons. The second was a convoluted, pretentious mess that only managed to be (barely) watchable because of Colin Farrell, the third was a solid, compellingly acted detective story that lacked the wow factor to win over fans who had jumped ship, and this last installment was a disappointment so crushingly dull that it lacked anything resembling the True Detective name.

But let’s not let all of that taint our memories of how fantastic the show came out swinging. Over the span of eight episodes, it thrust the audience into this hauntingly bleak detective story that could only have come about from a network like HBO giving complete creative freedom to writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga. Fukunaga took full advantage and transformed the sleepy, swampy backwoods of Louisiana into the perfectly creepy setting for the show’s occult conspiracy. His cinematic direction established a distinct mood that always made the show’s atmosphere equally enthralling and uncomfortable. The creative peak of his direction came in the climax of “Who Goes There”, wherein Rust goes undercover with a gang as they rob a house in a bad part of town. As Rust tries to make sure that nobody gets hurt while keeping his cover, the tension winds and winds until everything goes wrong, leading to complete chaos as Rust desperately tries to make it out alive amidst a flurry of bullets. Oh—and it’s all captured in a six-minute tracking shot that fluidly weaves in and out of the situation’s anarchy. It’s quite a feat.

But Pizzolatto was just as important in the equation. While he may have gotten self-indulgent in the later seasons, his brand of philosophical, sharp-edged dialogue was a wonder across these eight episodes. Matthew McConaughey’s performance is an all-timer, perfectly disappearing into the role of a man who, through his body language, speaking mannerisms, and seamless makeup, transformed into Rust Cohle. The most mesmerizing scenes of the show are those where McConaughey launches into these profound monologues that expose a nihilist’s take on the human condition. With an endless supply of cigarettes and beer cans in tow, he is taken on an arc where, after extreme tragedy, he immerses himself in this case with plenty of hardened, cold-as-ice moments that are impossible to peel your eyes from.

Try to pick the best of Cohle’s scenes. Is it his monologue on the inherent selfishness of having children and “the sin of being a father”? His examination of Christianity and the emptiness of those who follow it upon visiting a sermon? His empathetic interrogation of a woman who killed her own children, eventually building to a crushing line where he reveals his true self, telling her “If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself”? His hazy description of life seeming like a dream that leads to a final line where, as a masked serial killer emerges from the woods, he says in voiceover that “like a lot of dreams…there's a monster at the end of it”? I don’t want to downplay Harrelson’s role as the straight man to Cohle with his own demons, but McConaughey just continued to astound in every scene.

The detective story is one that’s been told many times on TV, but True Detective managed to breathe fresh life into that template. For one, they fully embraced a nonlinear timeline that added an extra layer of mystery and complexity to the plot. Not only did this let our two main men off the leash in some lengthy present-day interrogations, we got to see how the characters’ relationships progressed over time and how the dangling threads of the case continued to consume them. A similar strength was in the supernatural undertones of the case, as the Southern Gothic aesthetic was accompanied by a myriad of allusions to Carcosa and The Yellow King. The sense of a larger evil loomed over the entire season, which disappointed some when it turned out that the killer was just a machete-wielding lunatic behind the woods.

It’s an understandable criticism, particularly when the last two episodes saw a slight dip in quality in comparison to the previous six, but the allusions still worked to flesh out the themes and philosophy behind the show. It may have disappointed on a plot level, but it served a deeper purpose and built up the warped beliefs of this cult. It gave them a dangerous personality and led to a conclusion that reminded Marty and Rust that, though they won this battle, there’s still a bigger war happening in the shadows that they couldn’t take down. Moreso, the case changes Rust; after seeing him wallow in his own pessimism and cynicism for the first seven episodes, it was powerful to see him break down into tears after realizing this dangling mystery of his life is finally solved and declare that “the light is winning”.

Look, I was not a fan of True Detective: Night Country. In fact, I thought every aspect was executed poorly by new showrunner Issa López. For all of his faults, Nic Pizzolatto even made the lesser seasons under his helm cohesive with the overall tone of the show, whereas Night Country simply felt like a generic Netflix series under a more prestigious banner (for as bad as season 2 felt at the time, it has aged slightly better with the release of this latest season; it still isn’t good, but at least it took some creative risks and always stayed watchable due to Colin Farrell’s powerhouse performance).

That’s why it’s unfortunate that discourse around the show has turned into yet another culture war; López and star Kali Reis are engaging in social media fights with anyone who dares to criticize the season, Pizzolatto is reposting fans’ displeasure with the season to clearly state his displeasure for HBO handing his show to another writer, and anyone who criticizes the show is accused of being a misogynist, which apparently stemmed from the first season (a real quote from Vox’s latest write-up: “Ever since, that first season has primarily been remembered, not for its incredible acting, its brilliant aesthetic touches, that legendary six-minute tracking shot, nor even the now-ubiquitous line, “Time is a flat circle,” but for the misogyny.” Agree to disagree, I guess.)

It seems that everyone is acting like petulant children here, as the fans who can’t handle women detectives should just scream “WOKE” a few more times and run back into their echo chambers. However, the bigger issue is that far too many people are seemingly unable to accept that some fans were genuinely unhappy with the season, and that the complaints of racism, sexism, and any other -isms are merely straw man deflections of legitimate criticism (in some ways, it’s just as cheap of a defense as a showrunner covering their ears and saying “La la la, I can’t hear you, you misogynist!”).

I beg us all to just go back to talking about television civilly again. It’s easy for some to say that True Detective season 1 was lightning in a bottle, simply great actors paired with a writer and director who were never quite able to match that quality. But doing so would dismiss every carefully crafted aspect that made it such a rich drama on its own and revolutionary for the next era of television that followed it.