20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About True Detective

19. The Show Was Originally Going To Be A Novel

Given Pizzolatto's literary background - he taught fiction and literature at at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago, and DePauw University prior to up and moving to Hollywood to pursue a career in screenwriting - it's not a great surprise that True Detective was at first planned as a novel. Having already written and published Galveston, a crime novel set in Texas, Pizzolatto thought he had his follow-up in the True Detective story. "When I was working on the actual story to contain these two men and the themes I wanted to touch on, I was thinking about breaking into TV", Pizzolatto would later reveal. In 2012, after reworking the idea into a TV drama, HBO picked up the series.