True Detective Season 3 Premiere Review: 7 Ups & 3 Downs From Episodes 1 & 2

2. Focusing On Just The One Character

While Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle was the more attention-grabbing, True Detective's first season was very much a two-hander with him and Woody Harrelson's Marty Hart. For Season 2, in order to avoid the issue of replicating that dynamic, we were given a whopping four leads, which didn't work out. Now it's stripped all the way back to one. Dorff's West may be a partner detective, but this is very much about Wayne Hays above all others, and that actually serves the series well.

Hays is, from the get-go, a fascinating character. In the 1980s especially, he comes with a sense of internalised trauma and intensity just below the surface, but in essence we have three versions of the character, which makes it wiser to have him at the centre. The Hays of the 1990s is different to the man of the 80s, and the man in 2015 even more so.

It touches upon his race with surprising deftness, and the sense of him being an outsider even if he's not being racially abused. We hear of his past, but not always from himself, and see how much it's changed him over the years: he becomes harsher in the 1990s, when things aren't going so well for him, and then more emotional in 2015, when he's lost so much and is reflecting back upon things. Like Rust Cohle, he's a skilled detective, but that's about where the similarities end. Cohle was a great character, but Hays feels like a real person.