True Detective season 1
The first season of True Detective, an American anthology crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolatto, premiered on January 12, 2014, on the premium cable network HBO. The principal cast consisted of Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Michael Potts, and Tory Kittles. The season had eight episodes, and its initial airing concluded on March 9, 2014. Each following True Detective season has its own self-contained story, following a disparate set of characters in various settings.
True Detective
8
January 12 –
March 9, 2014
Constructed as a nonlinear narrative, season one focuses on Louisiana State Police homicide detectives Rustin "Rust" Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin "Marty" Hart (Harrelson), who investigated the murder of Dora Lange in 1995. During the investigation, Hart's infidelity threatens his marriage to Maggie (Monaghan), and Cohle struggles to cope with his troubled past. Seventeen years later, they must revisit the investigation, now seemingly related to a slew of other unsolved missing-person cases and murders.
True Detective's first season explores themes of philosophical pessimism, masculinity, and Christianity; critics have analyzed the show's portrayal of women, its auteurist sensibility, and the influence of comics and weird horror fiction on its narrative.
Pizzolatto initially conceived True Detective as a novel, but felt it was more suitable for television. The episodes, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, were filmed in Louisiana over a three-month period. The series was widely acclaimed by critics and cited as one of the strongest dramas of 2014. It was a candidate for numerous awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film, and won several other honors for writing, cinematography, direction, and acting.
Production[edit]
Conception[edit]
Before creating True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, DePauw University, and the University of Chicago.[9] Inspired by HBO's series The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood,[10] he began working on a short story collection that he later published as Between Here and the Yellow Sea in 2006.[9] He published a novel, Galveston, in 2010, and began writing television scripts. His earlier attempts at television writing were unsuccessful because of a lack of money.[10] Pizzolatto's first major gig in television writing came in 2011, as a screenwriter for AMC's series The Killing. He credits the show with giving him a glimpse of the inner workings of the television industry. Pizzolatto grew increasingly dissatisfied with the series' creative direction, and left two weeks into staff writing sessions for its second season.[9]
True Detective was intended to be a novel, but once the project took definite form, Pizzolatto thought the narrative's shifts in time and perspective made it more suitable for television.[9][11] He pitched an adaptation of Galveston, and from May to July 2010 he developed six screenplays, including an early, 90-page draft of the True Detective pilot script.[9][10] Pizzolatto secured a development deal with HBO for a potential pilot series shortly thereafter.[9] He wrote a second True Detective script soon after his departure from The Killing thanks to the support of production company and manager Anonymous Content,[9] which ultimately produced and developed the project in-house.[12] By April 2012, following a heated bidding period, HBO commissioned eight episodes of True Detective,[12] with a budget of $4–4.5 million per episode.[13] Pizzolatto did not hire a writing staff because he believed a collaborative approach would not work with his isolated, novelistic process, and that a group would not achieve his desired result.[14] After working alone for about three months, the final copy of the project script was 500 pages long.[14][15]
Themes and analysis[edit]
Masculinity and depiction of women[edit]
Commentators have noted masculinity as a theme in True Detective. Christopher Lirette of Southern Spaces said the show was about "men living in a brutally masculine world" and women are depicted as "things-to-be-saved and erotic obstacles" à la Double Indemnity (1944) and Chinatown (1974).[43] Slate's Willa Paskin said True Detective's depiction of its female characters—as sex workers, the deceased and "a nagging wife"—seemed to reveal an intent to reflect the protagonists' "blinkered worldview and the very masculine, Southern cop culture they inhabited".[44] Some commentators saw Hart's characterization as a manifestation of this idea, evident through his conventional view of women as virgins and whores, as well as his treatment of Maggie and Audrey.[43][45][46] When Hart confronts the two men who had sex with Audrey, he is in essence "charging other men a price for infringing on the daughter he sees, in a muddled way, as both deserving of protection and badly in need of being controlled".[45]
In her piece for Salon, Janet Turley said that the women "become reflections of the men", given that the True Detective universe is seen through the eyes of the show's male leads.[47] Sam Adams of Indiewire contended that the story was about "the horrible things men do to women", many of which are never reported to or investigated by authorities. Adams wrote, "No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up".[48] He said the role of women was more profound because Cohle suffers through his ex-wife and deceased daughter and Hart is unable to "deal appropriately with the women who are there".[48] According to Scott Wilson, a cultural studies lecturer at Kingston University, women are categorized as "the superegoic, the obscene and the sacred".[49] Maggie, in Wilson's interpretation, is portrayed as the superegoic wife who "constantly makes demands on her guilty husband or partner tying him or her down and deflecting him or her from his symbolic role as police".[49]
The philosopher Erin K. Stapleton subscribes to the theory that Dora Lange's corpse serves to "provide the initial territory or orientation through which the communities of True Detective are formed."[50] It is through Dora's corpse that Cohle and Hart's partnership is first clearly articulated and in addition to their own bond, "the intimate knowledge" of her body is the basis of all of the other relationships in their respective lives.[50][51] Her narrative thus, by proxy, influences both men's character development as they delve into the case.[52]
Religion[edit]
True Detective explores Christianity and the dichotomy between religion and rationality. Born into a devout Catholic household, Pizzolatto said that as a child he saw religion as storytelling that acts "as an escape from the truth".[53] According to Andrew Romano at The Daily Beast, the season alludes to Pizzolatto's childhood and creates a parallel between Christianity and the supernatural theology of "Carcosa": "Both ... are stories. Stories people tell themselves to escape reality. Stories that 'violate every law of the universe.'"[53] Romano believed this message is not critical of religion per se; rather it shows how the "power of storytelling" and religious zeal "can wind [you] up in some pretty sick places."[53] Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly has opined that the show becomes more self-aware through Cohle's harsh critiques of religion, which he viewed as a vehicle for commentary about pop culture escapism.[54] Stapleton observed that the crimes on True Detective—through its victims and the implications of sacrifice and sexual violence—"respond to the conservative Christianity from which they originate, and seek to exploit the opportunities for the pleasure of transgression such a structure offers."[55]
Theorist Edia Connole saw connections to Philip Marlowe and Le Morte d'Arthur's Lancelot in True Detective's presentation of Cohle, all "knights whose duty to their liege lord is tempered with devotion to God."[56] Other aspects of True Detective evoke Christian imagery, including the opening scene, which Connole felt mirrored the crucifixion of Jesus.[57] The author and philosopher Finn Janning argued that Cohle's evolution illustrates an affinity between Buddhism and philosophical pessimism.[58] A self-proclaimed pessimist, Cohle is, however, changed by a near-death experience in the season finale, in which he has an epiphany, seeing death as "pure love": this echoes the Buddhist concept of rigpa.[58]
Reception[edit]
Viewership[edit]
True Detective debuted to 2.3 million U.S. viewers, becoming HBO's highest rated series premiere since the pilot episode of Boardwalk Empire.[78] Ratings remained steady and peaked at the finale, which drew 3.5 million viewers.[79] Overall, season one averaged 2.33 million viewers,[80] and its average gross audience (which includes DVR recordings, reruns, and HBO Go streaming) totaled 11.9 million viewers per episode, thus becoming HBO's highest rated freshman show since the first season of Six Feet Under 13 years earlier.[81][82]
Home media[edit]
On June 10, 2014, HBO Home Entertainment released the first season of True Detective on DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. In addition to the eight episodes, both formats contain bonus content including interviews with McConaughey and Harrelson, Pizzolatto, and composer Burnett on the show's development, "Inside the Episode" featurettes, two audio commentaries, and deleted scenes from the season.[122] During its first week of sale in the United States, True Detective was the number two-selling TV series on DVD and Blu-ray Disc, selling 65,208 copies.[123]
Bibliography
Footnotes