In the 10 years since the first season of “True Detective” premiered, our definition of prestige television has warped, fractured and smoothed out again, many would say to the medium’s detriment. Some of that disappointment has to do with our own outsized expectation that everything must be on par with HBO’s standard setters — if only! Studios’ abandonment of originality in favor of familiar IP shoulders a lot of that blame, too.
We hooked into Nic Pizzolatto’s eerie, engrossing, seductive and terrifying beauty right when this fever was beginning to take hold. The poetic dialogue woven through each "True Detective" episode and the bayou haze cast a spell on the audience, all of which Matthew McConaughey took full advantage of in playing Rust Cohle, the philosopher detective driving Woody Harrelson’s cynical Marty Hart.
