Its hard to imagine a more fitting title for the show than True Detective, but its true that at one stage Pizzolatto was toying with the idea of naming his new series The Murder Ballads. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga told Vanity Fair: Nic and I both liked this one version called The Murder Ballads, but he was more in love with True Detective in terms of the broadness of the anthology. Since we were creating a brand, as much as we were creating a title for this series, we had to go more broad.