- Michele K. Short
- Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson: two of the best southern drawls in Hollywood
How many more television shows about a couple of detectives working tirelessly to track down a killer—destroying or altogether eschewing healthy interpersonal relationships in the process—is the entertainment world going to produce for us? If the networks know their beeswax, this is specifically not a question we’re asking ourselves, because we’re just ever so happy to continue to ride shotgun with various hardscrabble cop types as murders are committed and solved. As viewers, we’ve been pretty fortunate that so many of the shows that sate our morbid curiosities—even if they didn’t immediately sate our love of quick, tidy resolutions—have been so well made; I’m thinking of recent ones like BBC Two’s The Fall and AMC’s The Killing. Just two episodes in, you can go ahead and add HBO’s True Detective—starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, which is insane—to that list.
The characters are well conceived, Cohle in particular, a man so tormented by loss and addiction he says he believes that human consciousness is an evolutionary aberration and that the species should commit mass suicide. Harrelson’s Hart is the more conventional cop character—the family man who takes the more conventional approach to police work, though not necessarily monogamy—but doesn’t feel like an archetype. The show owes a lot to its cinematographer, stylist, and location scout—the acting is remarkable, but the deeply eerie atmosphere makes me way more excited about solving this crime with Hart and Cohle.
