True Detective: Series 1 (2014)

Almost before it was released, True Detective was hailed as the future of intellectual, auteurist television. Set in the Deep South, it’s written in its entirety by novelist Nick Pizzolatto, and centres on a ritualistic murder that preoccupies two detectives, played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaghey, over multiple timelines, from the mid-1990s to the present day. The rapport between Harrelson and McConaghey works brilliantly, not just because of how well their interactions are scripted, but because they occupy a similar cinematic niche, which creates an odd identification and interplay that adds fuel to the series’ fire. However, great segments of the series are not really dialogue-driven – instead, Pizzolatto devotes quite a bit of time to McConaghey’s philosophical musings, especially in the present-day timeline, which takes the form of a series of police interviews. That creates quite an aphoristic tone, which sometimes feels a bit like a screenwriter experimenting with all the great one-liners he can think of, albeit without the coffee-table camp of, say, House of Cards, which also revels in aphoristic quotability. Yet it’s also what allows director Cary Fukugawa to craft such an incredible style, since the series is as distinctive for having a single director as a single writer, although that hasn’t been as much of a selling-point. And Fukugawa seems to have taken Pizzolatto’s style as a cue for visual aphorism, painstakingly crafting single shots that stand apart from the narrative, even in the midst of it, to demand appreciation and contemplation on their own terms. For the most part, they’re establishing shots, or perhaps disestablishing shots, since they seem to dissociate themselves from the narrative in the same breath that they frame it, hovering above each scene like the series’ dream of itself. In that sense, it perhaps makes most sense as ornamental television – it needs to be hung on a wall, enshrined on a widescreen - or even occult television, since clues here are more like talismans than procedural tools, repositories of dark wonder that ritualise your attention into the rapture that’s flooded a new wave of fan forums. And, as in Twin Peaks, you remember the clues more than the case itself, which just gets slower and slower, freezes over, as if yearning to congeal and glaciate into a single, irreducible, incredible image.