Get Hooked on/Creeped Out by 2014's First Killer New Show: True Detective
Considering how rambunctious Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson can be on-screen, watching them try to outdo each other at going low-key in HBO's True Detective is like watching Drew Brees and Colin Kaepernick play expert pool instead of football. The actors play Rust Cohle and Martin Hart, two Louisiana state-police gumshoes who worked a serialkiller case in 1995 and get called in to reconstruct it today. But unless the perp is Cohle himself—a distinct possibility— caring about whodunit would risk turning True Detectiveinto The Killing all over again, and you remember how screwed we all felt by that one.What gets series creator Nic Pizzolatto, director Cary Fukunaga and their lead actors jazzed is the—brace yourself— philosophical contrast between Hart's and Cohle's POVs. One is a proudly "normal" husband and father who turns out to have demons up the literal butt, while the other is a standoffish nihilist who went into police work after figuring out he didn't have it in him to commit suicide. If all this sounds like Dixie-fried James Ellroy, the Dixie-fried part helps a lot. Pizzolatto can't get enough of southern culture's contradictory-or-are-they religiosity and loose living.
The trick that lets him get away with Cohle's outsider disquisitions—some of the most highfalutin palaver ever heard on TV—is that Hart, despite his own conflicts, keeps calling out his partner for peddling a bunch of hooey. True, Harrelson has played this kind of ostentatiously bluff, secretly screwed-up macho role before. But he's rarely had such good dialogue to work with, and the same goes for McConaughey. Anyhow, you've got to admire a series that— despite nekkid dead women, pervy paganism, underage hookers, a castrated religious fanatic, and the rest of the southern-gothic menu—only turns up the voltage for real when the two leads are driving around in a car and arguing about life.
The trick that lets him get away with Cohle's outsider disquisitions—some of the most highfalutin palaver ever heard on TV—is that Hart, despite his own conflicts, keeps calling out his partner for peddling a bunch of hooey. True, Harrelson has played this kind of ostentatiously bluff, secretly screwed-up macho role before. But he's rarely had such good dialogue to work with, and the same goes for McConaughey. Anyhow, you've got to admire a series that— despite nekkid dead women, pervy paganism, underage hookers, a castrated religious fanatic, and the rest of the southern-gothic menu—only turns up the voltage for real when the two leads are driving around in a car and arguing about life.
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