The Smell of the Psychosphere

Harrelson and McConaughey rock the bayou in True Detective.

«««« True Detective.  Written and created by Nic Pizzolato. Directed by Cary Fukunaga. On HBO Sundays at 9pm, and on demand.

          

It goes without saying that there are too many cop/detective shows on television (but there, I said it anyway). Thanks to that low signal-to-noise ratio, a show has to be pretty damn remarkable for viewers to take notice. For all the merely "pretty good" policiers out there, that's bad news.

          HBO has now given us something better than "pretty good" in Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective, which is now midway through its initial eight-episode run. There's a reason for the generic-sounding title: True Detective is an anthology series, with different casts tackling different cases each season. First time out, we have Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as a pair of detectives investigating a bizarre ritual-murder case in rural Louisiana. And like a flathead catfish on a 3/4-ounce leadhead jig, this writer is hooked.

          Pizzolatto, a Louisiana native, was a novelist and academic before he got into television. The particular feel of Detective—its neo-noir sense of setting, its gumbo of literariness and ominous seediness—is no doubt traceable to that background. Perhaps equally important, Pizzolatto is the show's only writer, giving it a consistency of tone reminiscent of the best crime fiction. That consistency is bolstered by the fact that the show has but a single director, Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, 2011's Jane Eyre). This is not creation-by-committee.

          McConaughey and Harrelson play a pair of seriously mismatched colleagues on the trail of the kind of killer/exhibitionist reminiscent of Se7en or Twin Peaks. McConaughey's Rust Cohle is a former narc who spent a little too long operating undercover. After losing his child—and then his marriage—to a freak accident, he's acquired a worldview so bleak he makes Schopenhauer look like Pollyanna. “I got a bad taste in my mouth out here,” he says as the two cops make their rounds. “Aluminum, ash, it’s like you can smell the psychosphere.” Confronting a tent-full of Christian revivalists, he diagnoses Christianity as a kind of memetic cancer, a communicable mental illness.         

          Harrelson's Martin Hart, by contrast, prides himself on being a regular guy's guy, a family man not likely to be carried away by Rust's neat forensic theories or philosophic chatter. As we get to know him, though, we see that his allergy against introspection makes a good defense against the fact he isn't such a good family man after all, as his tormented wife (played by the brilliant and lovely Michelle Monaghan) is coming to realize.

          Playing the haunted genius, McConaughey has perhaps the more obviously juicy role. But in fact they are both halves of a classic pairing of character types, the "man of action" partnered with the "man of the mind", that has a pedigree going back to Kirk + Spock, Aubrey + Maturin, and even (in a more satiric vein) Don Quixote + Sancho Panza. McConaughey is indeed terrific here—and with his performance in Dallas Buyer's Club, clearly the actor of the year. But together, he and Harrelson make this version of True Detective one of the most fascinating character studies to come along in a long time, big screen or small.

          As its inaugural season is only half-way done, it's impossible to say if the show will finish on as high a level as it started. No guarantees that subsequent seasons, with different stories and different casts, will be anywhere as good. But for now, let's savor being in Pizzolatto's psychosphere.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro