When I first heard Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were starring in an HBO show together, I immediately imagined a buddy comedy about two stoners who run around town naked and play the bongos. Instead, the show is True Detective, a gritty drama about two hard-nosed police detectives in the Deep South (Louisiana, to be exact) who track a sadistic killer over a span of seventeen years.
Who’d have guessed it? But the result is a dark, gripping pilot from creator and first-time screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, superbly acted and shot throughout. It’s not nearly as cheerful as the stoner buddy show might have been, but it captures your attention from the start and never lets you go.
In the same way the deserts of Albuquerque defined the tone of Breaking Bad, the run-down atmosphere of the slums of Louisiana creates a melancholy mood, captured expertly by cinematographer Adam Arkapaw. A dead woman is found in the middle of nowhere, posed naked against a tree with a strange pattern carved into her back. The detectives are both assigned to track down the killer, with nothing but a few twigs tied together as a clue.
But the show is not about Louisiana, nor is it truly about the murder. The real meat of the show comes in the Odd Couple-esque relationship between Harrelson and McConaughey, who completely own their roles. Harrelson plays the role of Martin Hart fairly straight, a devoted detective with a beautiful wife (Michelle Monaghan) and two happy children. He’s not a perfect individual – his passion for his work seems likely to get in the way of his family life in future episodes – but for the most part he’s a strait-laced detective.
Detective Rust Cohle, played by McConaughey, is the wildcard. As Harrelson’s character says, “a smart guy who’s steady is hard to find,” and Cohle is far from steady. Cohle struggles with alcoholism (and possibly other addictions) and the memory of his dead daughter haunts him through every second of his waking life. He’s indeed very smart, and accurately sizes up the murder scene within minutes of first glance. But he’s almost robotic in every human interaction, socially awkward and void of emotion. He describes himself as a pessimist, because (in his words) he's “bad at parties.”
The interplay between the two leads provides some fantastic moments, some of them darkly funny and some of them dark. The pilot reaches a climax when Hart invites Cohle over for dinner with his family (on his dead daughter’s birthday, though Hart doesn't know that), and Cohle shows up teary-eyed and drunk, bearing an inappropriate gift for the occasion. The two detectives could not be more different, and yet they still begin to bond as Hart discovers the horrible circumstances that Cohle lives with.
Only at the end does the murder mystery really start to develop, when the two detectives look into the disappearance of another young girl and start to figure things out. The episode is set in two different periods of time, with one section in 1995 and the other in 2012, and it is immediately clear that the case spans over two decades. The ending of the pilot certainly does its part to create intrigue for future episodes, and the season is bound to have some twists and turns.
Yet this show would be nothing more than a standard psycho-killer procedural if it weren’t for the acting. A man who got his big break from sitcoms and has since developed into a fine dramatic actor, Harrelson again shows that he can be cast in just about any role, whether it be a basketball hustler, zombie killer or Louisiana police detective. McConaughey continues his hot streak, coming off critically acclaimed performances in The Lincoln Lawyer and Dallas Buyers Club and knocking another role out of the park. Martin Hart and Rust Cohle are two of the most intricately designed characters on television in quite some time, and the actors that play them couldn’t have pulled it off any better.
It’s almost a shame that the show was created in an anthology format, meaning that every season will feature different characters (think American Horror Story). We will only get to know Hart and Cohle for a mere eight episodes, but if the rest of the season is anything like the pilot, it will be a fantastic ride.