10 Most Memorable TV Drama Moments Of The 2010s
3. That Tracking Shot - True Detective (2014)
TV shows typically take a few years to amass a significantly feverish online following, whereby the aftershock of huge moments resonates throughout social media for days, weeks, even months and years afterwards. Think Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or The Walking Dead levels of hype.
True Detective achieved this status merely four episodes into its first season.
Landing film stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson was quite the coup for HBO, but it was the technical work of season director Cary Joji Fukunaga which cemented this particular episode into the pantheon of television greats, in a breathless six minute sequence.
When undercover detective Rust Cohle, McConaughey’s iconic co-protagonist, joins a nefarious biker gang posing as cops in an ill-fated attempt to raid a stash house in the projects, the s**t inevitably hits the fan. This takes the form of a seamless, unbroken tracking shot quite literally following Cohle through the quickly escalating chaos of a ruse gone, very, very wrong.
In the dark of night, surrounded by a palpably rising hostility that explodes into violence, it’s all too easy to forget the certainty of Cohle’s survival, almost as easily as forgetting to breathe.
When television aficionados look back on the most impactful scenes that the past decade has provided, it’s with the most hushed, awed whispers that they recall the dizzying legend of that tracking shot.