True Detective (season 1)

Main cast

Conception

Before creating True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto had worked as a literature professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, DePauw University, and the University of Chicago. Inspired by HBO's series The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood, he began working on a short story collection that he later published as Between Here and the Yellow Sea in 2006. Several years later he wrote a full-length novel titled Galveston, published in 2010, and around the same time began preparing to write for television. His earlier attempts at television writing were unsuccessful because of a lack of money. Pizzolatto's first major gig in television writing came in 2011, as a screenwriter for AMC's series The Killing. He credits the show with giving him a glimpse of the inner workings of the television industry. Pizzolatto grew increasingly dissatisfied with the series' creative direction, and left two weeks into staff writing sessions for its second season.

True Detective was intended to be a novel, but once the project took definite form, Pizzolatto thought the narrative's shifts in time and perspective made the story more suitable on screen. The writer pitched an adaptation of Galveston to two executives, and from May to July 2010 he developed six screenplays, including an early, 90-page draft of the True Detective pilot script. Pizzolatto secured a development deal with HBO for a potential pilot series shortly thereafter. He wrote a second True Detective script shortly after his departure from The Killing thanks to the support of production company and manager Anonymous Content, who ultimately produced and developed the project in-house. By April 2012, following a heated bidding period, HBO commissioned eight episodes of True Detective. Pizzolatto did not hire a writing staff because he believed a collaborative approach would not work with his isolated, novelistic process, and that a group would not achieve his desired result. After working alone for about three months, the final copy of the project script was 500 pages long. Because the series is an anthology, each season possesses a self-contained narrative, following a disparate set of characters in various settings.

Casting and crew

Pizzolatto began contemplating the lead roles while he was pitching the series to networks in early 2012. True Detective's anthology format allowed him the freedom to employ film stars, who normally avoid television series because of their busy schedules, because the show only required actors to commit for a single season. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were among the actors Pizzolatto considered for star billing. McConaughey, who had recently finished filming Killer Joe (2011), was contracted well before HBO commissioned the season. Impressed with his performance in The Lincoln Lawyer (2011), Pizzolatto at first assigned him to play Hart, but McConaughey convinced him to give him the part of Cohle. When asked in a Variety interview about his decision to switch parts, the actor replied, "I wanted to get in that dude's head. The obsession, the island of a man—I'm always looking for a guy who monologues. It's something really important as I feel I'm going into my better work." To prepare for the role, McConaughey created a 450-page analysis—the "Four Stages of Rustin Cohle"—to study his character's evolution during the season.

Harrelson was the season's next significant casting, brought on to play Hart at McConaughey's request. Harrelson, who joined True Detective in part because of the people involved in the project, had worked with HBO in the 2012 film Game Change. Michelle Monaghan agreed to play the season's female lead, Maggie, because she was compelled by the direction of the plot and her character's story arc. Michael Potts and Tory Kittles completed the principal cast, playing detectives Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania, respectively. Major supporting roles in True Detective's first season include Kevin Dunn as Major Ken Quesada, Alexandra Daddario as Lisa Tragnetti, and Brad Carter as Charlie Lange.

Pizzolatto narrowed his search for a suitable director to Cary Joji Fukunaga, whom he knew from Anonymous Content, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Fukunaga was formally appointed as director after Iñárritu pulled out of the project because of film commitments. In preparation for his work on the series, Fukunaga spent time with a homicide detective of the Louisiana State Police's Criminal Investigations Division to develop an accurate depiction of a 1990s homicide detective's work. Fukunaga recruited Adam Arkapaw, director of photography of Top of the Lake, as project cinematographer. Arkapaw came to the director's attention for his work in Animal Kingdom (2010) and Snowtown (2011), and was hired after the two negotiated a deal at a meeting in San Francisco. Alex DiGerlando, who Fukunaga had worked with on Benh Zeitlin's Glory at Sea in 2008, was appointed as the production designer. Fukunaga said in an interview, "I knew what Alex accomplished in the swamps of Louisiana and given some money, how much more amazing he could be in building sets that would just be used for one or two days and be abandoned again."

Filming

Initially, True Detective's first season was due to shoot in Arkansas, but Pizzolatto later chose to film in Louisiana to take advantage of state tax incentives and the area's distinctive landscape: "There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all ... everything lives under layers of concealment. The woods are thick and dark and impenetrable. On the other hand you have the beauty of it all from a distance." Principal photography took three months (between 100 and 110 days), from January to June 2013. Approximately five minutes of film were shot per day. Production staff constructed various set pieces, among them a scorched chapel, Joel Theriot's tent revival, and the Louisiana State Criminal Investigations Division offices, the last of which they built inside an abandoned lightbulb warehouse near Elmwood. For the Dora Lange crime scene, the crew filmed exterior shots at a remote sugarcane field outside Erath which, because it was partially burned, inspired what DiGerlando called a "moody and atmospheric" backdrop for the corresponding interior scenes. The scene in which Cohle, taking Ginger hostage, escapes a housing complex amidst gunfire, was captured in Bridge City as a single six-minute tracking shot, a technique Fukunaga employed in Sin Nombre (2009) and Jane Eyre (2011). Shot in seven takes, preparation for the scene was extensive and demanding: McConaughey trained with Mark Norby to master a fighting style for his character, and the nature of the shoot required a team of stunt coordinators, make-up artists, and special effects crew on hand during its entire course. Elsewhere, shooting took place at the old Kenner High School campus and Fort Macomb, a nineteenth-century fort outside New Orleans.

Fukunaga took cues from David Lynch's Twin Peaks to adapt his filming style for TV. The entire season was shot on 35 mm film, which production staff chose to achieve a nostalgic quality. The season was filmed using a Panavision Millennium XL2 camera, and the choice of lens corresponded to the period when a scene took place. Scenes set in 1995 and 2002 were captured with Panavision PVintage lenses, which produced a softer image because they were made of recycled, low-contrast glass. As these scenes were written as a reflection of Cohle and Hart's memory, production sought to make them as cinematic as possible, to reflect what Arkapaw called "the fragmentation of their lucid imaginations back through their past." To achieve this, they relied on wider lenses to exaggerate composition. The 2012 scenes were shot with Panavision Primo lenses: the visual palette in comparison was sharper and had much more contrast, lending a modern aesthetic and, according to Arkapaw, pulling "characters out from their environments to hopefully help audiences get inside their heads."

Art design

Joshua Walsh was responsible for creating True Detective's artwork. His work for the show consists of over 100 individual "devil's nests"—twig sculptures created by the killer—in addition to wall paintings and miniature sculptures of men made of beer cans, among others. According to DiGerlando, Walsh's interests in hunting and taxidermy made him "the perfect dude for the job". A blueprint for the devil's nests was not well established in the script, other than specifications that the structures be able to stand on their own and feature a spiral motif. DiGerlando and Walsh went with a tripod design that showed a spiral when viewed from the base, and contained ladder-like crossing elements that symbolized the killer's desire to ascend to a dark spiritual plane. Each design had subtle differences from one another. DiGerlando cited the work of Henry Darger and James Charles Castle as strong stylistic influences and sought a primitive look for the sculptures, one that revealed the workings of a man with "some deep inner urge to express himself". To reflect this, Walsh built devil's nests using mud, disposable children's clothing, reeds, roots, and other materials he felt the killer would use himself.

The season's title sequence was a collaboration between director Patrick Clair, his Santa Monica-based studio Elastic, his Sydney-based studio Antibody, and Brisbane-based company Breeder. The design team emphasized southern Louisiana's industrial landscape because it reflected the characters' traits and personal, inner struggles. Clair stated that from the start he had an "unusually clear" vision of True Detective's finished opening sequence. Using Richard Misrach's photography book Petrochemical America (2012) as a template, the production team initially photographed the local scenery, and the resulting images were woven together to form the core of the title sequence. By the time production began animating, they faced several problems: the photographic stills were too grainy and the footage was too jagged. As a result, many shots were digitally altered and slowed to about a tenth of their original speed, which, according to Clair, "evoked a surreal and floaty mood that perfectly captured what we were after."

Creation of a 3D effect required the design team to use an assortment of low-poly meshes, or 3D geometric models. Using a variety of animation and special effects techniques, these images were later superimposed "with painstaking care" to avoid a sterile, digitized look. Clair said, "The most crucial thing to me was that this didn't feel digital, so we went to great lengths to incorporate as much organic imagery as possible." For some stills, the design team created digital doubles to develop more texture. The sequence's final cut was polished using optical glitching and motion distortion techniques. The Sydney Morning Herald included the opening sequence in a list of ten of the best title sequences on television.

Music

Season one's opening theme is "Far From Any Road", an alternative country song originally composed by The Handsome Family for their 2003 album Singing Bones. The True Detective soundtrack features a compilation of gospel and blues music, which were selected by Pizzolatto and T Bone Burnett. The pair opposed the use of Cajun music and swamp blues for the season's musical score because "it's already been done so much". Burnett said the score was intended to be character-driven, rather than inspired by other crime fiction drama. Songs by Bo Diddley, Melvins, The Staple Singers, Grinderman, Vashti Bunyan, Townes Van Zandt, and Captain Beefheart appear in season one. Burnett also composed original pieces with Rhiannon Giddens, who used a Swarmatron synthesizer, and Cassandra Wilson. HBO released an abridged soundtrack album, featuring 14 tracks from True Detective's first two seasons, on August 14, 2015 through physical media and iTunes.

Masculinity and depiction of women

Commentators note masculinity as a theme in True Detective. Christopher Lirette of Southern Spaces said the show was about "men living in a brutally masculine world" and as such, women are depicted as "things-to-be-saved and erotic obstacles", as in Double Indemnity (1944) and Chinatown (1974). Slate's Willa Paskin said True Detective's depiction of its female characters—as sex workers, the deceased, and "a nagging wife"—seemed to reveal an intent to reflect the protagonists' "blinkered worldview and the very masculine, Southern cop culture they inhabited." Some commentators saw Hart's characterization as a manifestation of this idea, evident through his conventional view of women as virgins and whores, as well as his treatment of Maggie and Audrey. For example, when Hart confronts the two men who had sex with Audrey, he is in essence "charging other men a price for infringing on the daughter he sees, in a muddled way, as both deserving of protection and badly in need of being controlled."

In her piece for Salon, Janet Turley claimed that women "become reflections of the men", given the True Detective universe is observed through the lenses of the show's male leads. Sam Adams of Indiewire contended that the season's central story focused on "the horrible things men do to women", many of which are never reported or investigated by authorities. Adams wrote, "No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up". Furthermore, he observed that the role of women is only more profound because Cohle is made to suffer by virtue of his ex-wife and deceased daughter, and Hart is unable to "deal appropriately with the women who are there". According to Scott Wilson, a cultural studies lecturer at Kingston University, women are distinguished into three groups—what he calls "the superegoic, the obscene and the sacred". Maggie, in Wilson's interpretation, is portrayed as the superegoic wife who "constantly makes demands on her guilty husband or partner tying him or her down and deflecting him or her from his symbolic role as police."

The philosopher Erin K. Stapleton subscribes to the theory that Dora Lange's corpse serves to "provide the initial territory or orientation through which the communities of True Detective are formed." It is through Dora's corpse that Cohle and Hart's partnership is first clearly articulated, and in addition to their own bond, "the intimate knowledge" of her body is the basis of all of the other relationships in their respective lives. Her narrative thus, by proxy, influences both men's character development as they dive deeper into their investigation.

Religion

True Detective explores Christianity and the dichotomy between religion and rationality. Born into a devout Catholic household, Pizzolatto said that as a child he saw religion as storytelling that acts "as an escape from the truth". According to Andrew Romano at The Daily Beast, the season alludes to Pizzolatto's childhood and creates a parallel between Christianity and the supernatural theology of "Carcosa": "Both ... are stories. Stories people tell themselves to escape reality. Stories that 'violate every law of the universe.'" Romano believed this message is not critical of religion per se, rather it shows how the "power of storytelling" and religious zeal "can wind [you] up in some pretty sick places." Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly said the show becomes more self-aware through Cohle's harsh critiques of religion, which he viewed as a vehicle for commentary about pop culture escapism. Stapleton observed that the crimes on True Detective—through its victims and the implications of sacrifice and sexual violence—"respond to the conservative Christianity from which they originate, and seek to exploit the opportunities for the pleasure of transgression such a structure offers."

Theorist Edia Connole saw connections to Philip Marlowe and Le Morte d'Arthur's Lancelot with regards to True Detective's presentation of Cohle, all "knights whose duty to their liege lord is tempered with devotion to God." Other aspects of True Detective likewise evoke Christian imagery, none more so than the show's opening scene, which Connole felt mirrors the crucifixion of Jesus. The author and philosopher Finn Janning argued that Cohle's evolution illustrates an affinity between Buddhism and philosophical pessimism. A self-proclaimed pessimist, Cohle is eventually changed by a near-death experience in the season finale, in which he has an epiphany seeing death as "pure love"; this echoes the Buddhist concept of rigpa.

Philosophical pessimism and influences

Critics have offered many readings of the influence of weird and horror fiction on True Detective's narrative, often examining the influence of Robert W. Chambers' short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) and Thomas Ligotti. Allusions to The King in Yellow can be observed through the show's dark philosophy, its recurring use of "Carcosa" and "The Yellow King" as motifs throughout the series, and its symbolic use of yellow as a thematic signature that signifies insanity, decadence, and mental illness. Pizzolatto was accused of plagiarizing Ligotti because of close similarities between lines in True Detective and text from Ligotti's nonfiction book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010) — accusations which Pizzolatto denied, while acknowledging Ligotti's influence.

Other philosophers and writers identified as influences include Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ray Brassier, Emil Cioran, and Eugene Thacker. Mathijs Peters, in a piece for Film International, argued that True Detective probes Schopenhauerian doctrine through its approach to individuality, self-denial, the battle between dark and light, and so forth. Ben Woodard noted the show's evolving philosophy, which examines a setting where culture, religion, and society are direct by-products of biological weakness. Woodward wrote, "Biological programming gets recuperated and socially redistributed visions, faiths, and acerbic personalities take the reins of uncertain ends creating a world where 'people go away'." Even the setting, Fintan Neylan argued, emphasizes a world "where the decrepitude of human ordering cannot be hidden." He stated, "This is not a place where hope fled; it is a place where hope could never take root. It is with these people and environs that the real horror is sourced." Yet Neylan observed that Cohle's actions are not motivated by misanthropy, rather a drive to challenge "those who try to either disguise or manipulate this frailty of humans for their own benefit." And in doing so, Cohle ultimately confronts "an entire philosophical history which has taken its task as that of sweeping frailty away." Christopher Orr at The Atlantic said True Detective was "Fincherian in the best sense", a fusion of Se7en (1995) and Zodiac (2007), because of its subject matter, sleek cinematography, and "vivid, unsettling" aura.

Some commentators noted further influences from comic book literature. Adams likened Cohle to the protagonist of Alan Moore's The Courtyard and drew parallels with Grant Morrison's The Invisibles for the show's brief exploration of M-theory with one of Cohle's monologues. ComicsAlliance and New York columnist Abraham Riesman cited Top 10 as the inspiration for the season finale based on dialogue from the episode's closing scene.

Auteurism

Another principal topic of discussion among critics has been True Detective's auteurist sensibility. Auteurism is a critical framework that assesses films or other works of art as reflections of the personal vision of individual authors, typically a director or writer. At the helm of each of the season's episodes are Pizzolatto and Fukunaga—its sole writer and director—a partnership that provides the show a unique place in a traditionally collaborative medium where broad sets of writers and directors work in tandem. Colin Robertson at The List saw Twin Peaks as the most notable artistic antecedent to True Detective's first season because both shows challenge crime drama cliches and "use the genre conventions of a whodunnit-style mystery as a sublimely subversive diving board, and leap off from there to tell a broader story."

Viewership

True Detective debuted to 2.3 million U.S. viewers, becoming HBO's highest rated series premiere since the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire. Ratings remained steady and peaked at the finale, which drew 3.5 million viewers. Overall, season one averaged 2.33 million viewers, and its average gross audience (which includes DVR recordings, reruns, and HBO Go streaming) totaled 11.9 million viewers per episode, thus becoming HBO's highest rated freshman show since the first season of Six Feet Under 13 years prior.

Reviews

The American press considered True Detective to be among the best television shows of 2014. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the first season holds an 87% rating based on 65 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5 out of 10. The site's critical consensus says, "In True Detective, performances by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey reel the viewer in, while the style, vision and direction make it hard to turn away." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, reported that the show received "universal acclaim", with an average rating of 87 based on 41 reviews.

The Daily Telegraph critic Chris Harvey regarded True Detective as the most ambitious TV project in a long time, a sentiment echoed by Andrew Romano from The Daily Beast and The Atlantic's Christopher Orr in their reviews for the show. Tim Goodman, in his piece for The Hollywood Reporter, identified the acting, dialogue, and sleek production as its most satisfying attributes. HitFix's Alan Sepinwall agreed and argued that these qualities not only "speak to the value of the hybrid anthology format Pizzolatto is using here", but "points to a potentially fascinating shift in dramatic series television." Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson believed the season successfully marries Fukunaga's sensibilities with Pizzolatto's script, resulting in "a captivating and offbeat tweak of a well-worn genre".

The ensemble performances, chiefly those of McConaughey and Harrelson, were frequently praised by critics. Robert Bianco in USA Today claimed that the pair met, and occasionally exceeded, the performance expectations of the so-called "golden age" of TV acting. David Wiegand of San Francisco Chronicle thought the two men were the standouts amongst a cast of actors that develop their characters "with incredible depth and detail". Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Lloyd felt their work was of "a very high order". The Boston Globe singled out Monaghan for her work on the show, as did Todd VanDerWerff from The A.V. Club, who wrote, "while her role is more thankless, she invests it with spirit". Variety's Brian Lowry said the True Detective cast consisted of "fine players on the periphery". RedEye, The Independent, and The Guardian also praised the ensemble performances.

Not all reviews were enthusiastic about the season. The New York Times journalist Mike Hale and Chris Cabin at Slant Magazine believed the script too readily deferred to religion as its narrative backbone. Gerald Peary of The Arts Fuse cited the writing as the show's main flaw, so too did Michael Starr from the New York Post, whose opinion was that it at times progressed at a notably sluggish pace. Hank Steuver of The Washington Post said True Detective failed to realize its own ambition, and Grantland's Andy Greenwald said the narrative was not up to form. On the other hand, Emily Nussbaum from The New Yorker commended the show's fluid style but condemned its portrayal of women, which she claimed revels in "macho nonsense". James Poniewozik of Time felt that, sans for Cohle and Hart, the show's characters were flat and lackluster.

Accolades

As the nominations for the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards approached, early media reports named True Detective among several potential miniseries candidates, due to a revision made by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences that recognized film and miniseries content as distinct categories. By March 2014, HBO had submitted True Detective as a drama series contender, an unconventional move given the show's anthology format and fierce competition from the likes of Breaking Bad and House of Cards. HBO's decision was censured by FX president John Landgraf, who remarked to reporters at a press event: "My own personal point of view is that a miniseries is a story that ends, a series is a story that continues. To tell you the truth, I think it’s actually unfair for HBO to put True Detective in the drama series category because essentially you can get certain actors to do a closed-ended series – a la Billy Bob Thornton in Fargo or Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective – who you can’t get to sign on for a seven-year [regular drama series] deal." Nevertheless, True Detective emerged as a frontrunner heading into the Primetime Emmy season, and in July 2014, was nominated for twelve awards; its closest rival, Breaking Bad, received sixteen nominations. The series ultimately won five Emmy awards: Outstanding Directing (Fukunaga), Outstanding Casting, Outstanding Main Title Design, Outstanding Make-Up, and Outstanding Cinematography.

True Detective was a candidate for a variety of awards, most of which recognized outstanding achievement in direction, cinematography, writing, and acting. It received four Golden Globe nominations, among them for Best Miniseries or Television Film, and a TCA Award for Program of the Year. Among the show's wins include a British Academy Television Award (BAFTA) for Best International Programme, a Writers Guild of America Award in the Dramatic Series category, and a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series (McConaughey).

Home media release

On June 10, 2014, HBO Home Entertainment released the first season of True Detective on DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. In addition to the eight episodes, both formats contain bonus content including interviews with McConaughey and Harrelson, Pizzolatto, and composer Burnett on the show's development; "Inside the Episode" featurettes; two audio commentaries; and deleted scenes from the season. During its first week of sale in the United States, True Detective was the number two selling TV show on DVD and Blu-ray Disc, selling 65,208 copies.