On True Detective Season 1

DVD Cover for True Detective Season 1 (Wikipedia)

We don't want to watch stories about good guys anymore. That's what it seems like, if we look at the popular, critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment. It's been happening for a while now, a corrosion of the line between good and evil on our screens. Superman's boring -- you can't write him interesting, you have to write around him -- but even Wolverine's standard fare now. We've gone beyond flawed protagonists, beyond every-man anti-heroes, and our pop culture seems to want to keep pushing further and further afield.  Now?  We're at Suicide Squad and Deadpool -- people that should be locked up, pychopaths, the criminally insane.  And that say nothing good about us, right?  Or that's how I think that slippery slope's supposed to go; someone else wrote something trying to plot a moral trajectory of our superhero films, so go look for that if you want.

But outside of the overloaded slate of superhero films – or, actually, as a cause of it -- movie studios are scared as hell, cluelessly groping around for what can even constitute a safe tentpole blockbuster anymore, and ending up with weird reboots and Apatow-y envelope-pushing comedies and lots of spies having to go off the grid. Television, meanwhile, – well, mainly HBO, and FX, and AMC -- seem suddenly enraptured with getting prestige, brooding, masculine, "adult" dramas greenlit at the moment.

HBO's True Detective is a good example of this.  The second season was apparently bad, and I'm not going to watch it, but the first season was highly acclaimed.  And it's so not-at-all interested in pushing a good guy on the viewer, but it even goes beyond that. Writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto is aggressively uninterested in making Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's characters relateable, or, really, any of the people on the show. There are moments interspersed to soften the blows, but not many, and they don't balance out with how the show makes sure to remind you how terrible human nature is. You might compare them to Walt from Breaking Bad if we're talking about unlikeable protagonists, but Breaking Bad was different: it wanted to make you root for him in the beginning, and it grounded his actions with a base of logic and conviction before slowly stripping away the rationalizations. True Detective doesn't reveal such an obvious throughline or arching purpose in its protagonists.

Rust (McConaughey) is a philosophising, nihilistic eccentric, and Marty (Harrelson) starts off as a stereotype of the man's man straight man cop, and they only slip downwards from there. I thought it was going to be sort of a police procedural following these two detectives, but it soon becomes evident that this isn't that type of story, and that the murder shown in episode one isn't all that central to True Detective. The mystery isn't solvable by the viewer; it's barely even followable. As in: they go out, they follow leads, they reach dead ends, but there's no web of intrigue being woven here. The people they talk to: the grieving parents, the reverend, the convict, they come and go. This isn't a series of eureka moments where Marty stares at a photograph and sees the guy they talked to from an episode ago where he says he wasn't, or they shake down a suspect and they get him to blurt out a meaningful name. The closest they come is coming across these scattered totems, but the case is unglamorous. Apparently there were a bunch of people that were watching it and trying to treat it as a real whodunnit, trying to gather clues and crack the case before the end, but I don't know, I can't imagine that ended satisfactorily for those people.

Nor is it a character study in the way you might think. Rust gets obsessed about the case, but that's because he's obsessive; he's smart, but he's not Sherlock Holmes, and he's too much of a loner to show much anything about what he really thinks, to anyone else or to the viewer. McConaghey does a fantastic job making every line of his drip with alternating condescension and obsession, but the character is alienating. With Marty, it just seems like he can treat the job as a job, and whatever issues he has back home or in his head aren't being obviously strained by their investigation. The obvious route would've been to show them cracking, slowly, under the exacting toll of their grisly line of work, but that's not the case. These characters are who they are, and it's hard to say that their lives would've turned out significantly different if they'd just passed the case along to the task force. They don't necessarily demonstrate greater depths, nor greater stresses, as the season goes on, at least not in a straightforward way, a visible way; their shadows just grow longer.

Yet True Detective still managed to draw me in. Even with how unlikable these characters were: they don't even reach anti-hero status, because I didn't even get a real sense that they were doing morally dubious things for the greater good. There is no looming evil baddie they're fighting, exactly, except in the abstract. There's someone killing women out there, but the women don't matter; the dead ones, nor really the live characters orbiting our protagonists either; and it isn't as if we're seeing our detectives following the killer's trail of dead victims. All we see of them are branches twisted into occult-ish shapes, left behind, for most of the season. The mystery isn't there to hook you in, though the show still manages to intersperse a sense of tension throughout. You want to see what happens next -- more than you want to know what already happened.  Even without a character to root for; because these characters are unpredictable, and you want to watch them work and talk and just, continue, piece by piece, episode by episode, more than you want to watch them simply succeed or fail.

I bet this show would be a good study for screenwriters, because it seems to break some big storytelling conventions. The story, it doesn't build, not really -- there's no real structure. Instead the show, and these characters, falls down successive rabbit holes, and take us along with them.