True Detective

True Detective is a fantastic series: dark, hauntingly beautiful, and with a killer soundtrack that does its job manipulating audience emotions.   The eight episodes tell a complete story, jumping backwards and forwards in time, of two detectives, Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (played by Woody Harrelson) who investigate a ritual-style murder that “makes their careers.”  The first 6 episodes of story is framed in a series of highly effective flashbacks, allowing you to learn about the two main characters and what makes these men tick. One of them is suspected by other police of having been involved with the murder,  as new evidence is brought to light. The last two episodes are set in present day Louisiana and Cohle and Harts attempt to discover someone they might have missed the first time they worked this case in 1995.

Matthew McConaughey does an excellent of job of being brilliant, dark, and obsessive to the point of craziness.  Nobody likes Cohle, but nobody can deny that he’s good at his job.  Woody Harrelson plays a unfaithful, drunk hypocrite that has serious issues controlling his emotions, his libido, and the thoughts and actions of the women in his life.  Hart seems to have it all, but can’t make good decisions about his personal life, which spills into his work. Both of Cohle and Hart are anti-heros, both of them lie, both of them break the law in the pursuit of the murders, and both are compelling to watch.

The dialogue between the two men is fantastic.  "Do you believe it's possible to be in love with more than one woman," Hart asks.  "I don't believe it is possible to love at all," Cohle chillingly responds. 

Lousiana is also a character as well as a backdrop for the story.  The landscape obscures the victims, hides clues, and shelters murders.  The bayou is breathtaking, and it breeds impoverished communities of people that are insular.  Outsiders like Cohle, originally from Texas via Alaska, seem to be drawn to and repelled to the local culture at the same time.  Hart embodies living with its squandered opportunities but also provides the glimpses of its possible reinventions.  

The aging process and the passage of time is depicted convincingly and methodically in the hair, makeup, clothes, the artifacts like phones, houses, cars and guns.  We are only going back to 1995, this is not vintage TV like Mad Men, but the settings are very believable and easy to relate to if you've lived through the 1990s and the first decade of this century.

Spoiler Alert:
Have just read some strange critics reviews, which I guess should always be taken with a grain of salt.  Sometimes people write a column to show off what they know, rather than to provide honest feedback of a show.  Sometimes people have their own issues to promote and they view everything through the lens of that issue.

True Detective is part of a genre, very much in the spirit of noir detective stories, but it also subverts the genre by being a combination of drama, thriller, and mystery, and local history narrative, while also paying homage to the buddy cop genre in long-running TV shows.   The buddy cop genre is turned on its head here, though -- it not clear until the last episode if this a tragedy (in the classical epic sense - hero is brought low by a tragic flaw or in this case the anti-heroes with many flaws) or a redemption story.  Some of the critics have talked about the high levels of testosterone injected into this series and lack of strong women characters -- that women are only portrayed as victims of sexual fantasy, murder, and domestic abuse. To which I would respond, “Are you serious?   Have you actually watched this show?”  The traditional femme fatal role which the noir genre always includes, shows a seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers, leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. In this story it is not a mysterious woman with a mysterious past, but a nurse who is also a betrayed wife, that brings down both men. 

The main characters are men, but everything that motivates them is equally influenced by men and women around them.  Hart gets told off by a madam at her whorehouse, who he is trying to tell off for having an under-aged girl working for her.  She responds that women don’t fit neatly into little boxes into which you men try compartmentalize us.  And it is telling that although he lives with a wife and two daughters, he doesn’t know them.  His main flaw is that he tries to see them in roles that he casts them in, rather than look at how they actually are.  This flaw is pointed out to him over and over by the women themselves, and by Cohle.  But his character is too thick to get it, which is realistic.  But just because he doesn’t get them, doesn't mean that the writers have created a story with weak female characters.
  

Cohle is the way he is because his mother abandoned him at when he was two years old, and he was raised by his Vietnam Vet father, who was clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.   When the show starts, Rust Cohle is still dealing with the death of his baby daughter.  He seems to be a self-imposed loner who can’t make connections with people, because the two crucial relationships with females that connect his life to the past and the future can only be described by one word: loss.  And in one of the episodes, a woman that he clearly respects and desires because she is a mother and a wife (something he clearly longs for but believes he doesn't deserve), uses him in a shocking way. 

Cohle sets himself up in the role of philosopher, and with his long hair and beard the in 2012 version of himself, there is a definite Jesus motif in his appearance, personifying what comes off as his God complex to other characters through the years.  The case that Cohle and Hart are working on is about saving women and children, but it is also about saving themselves.  Both men are the children of women.  Both men have suffered something, and so they can relate to women victims.