True Detective: 10 Reasons Season 1 Can’t Be Topped

10. The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts

Examining True Detective piece-by-piece feels like a game of quickly diminishing returns. In the first instance, True Detective is a procedural following a grounded every-man and a deeply flawed genius as they investigate a series of brutal, religiously affiliated murders in the murky Louisiana bayou. The characters themselves take on the basic clichéd attributes of a womanising blue-collar officer with a chip on his shoulder (Hart) and ex-addict-turned-conspiracy-ridden-philosopher (Cohle). On top of that, women are treated mainly as victims €“ not exactly a valid example of a gender equality-focussed stance €“ and the villains are all meth-addicted bucktooth hillbillies or whiter-than-white politicians who breed corruption. And then there is the locale of Louisiana which has become a regular addition on to TV screens (True Blood, American Horror Story) but here is painted under the belief that the deep-fried South is inhabited purely by religious nutbags and child killers. As well as this, there is the fact that the murders have a strange Hannibal/Dexter-esque artistic quality and that they seem to be linked to a vast political conspiracy. Yet True Detective is utterly compelling and feels fresh in every beat, proof that it is the whole that defies the individual qualities that consists within. Writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga took the conventions of a pulp detective thriller and made it their own, following in the footsteps of other existentially-minded cop stories such as The Pledge and Zodiac to create layered, dense puzzle of a TV show. To incorporate established cliches and still be able to create an environment in which all of these elements can be successfully married is one thing; to do it again would require a minor miracle.