True Detective: Season 1 [DVD] [2014]

The only season of True Detective worth buying in my opinion, and that is largely because of the excellent performances of the two stars, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. A must watch.

This is a spellbinding series starting with the first note of the Handsome Family's opening Southern gothic song "Far from any road", to the excruciatingly tense last episode. "True Detective" amounts to the greatest binge television event of 2014 leaving the viewer begging for more. This reviewer stayed in the house on the hottest day of the year glued to screen and sweating profusely after watching 5 episodes in a row. A week later Disc One was back in the DVD to watch it all again. Every now and then a series comes to the screen where all the working parts are in prime condition and its cast list so perfect that to suggest a potential tweak would be a form of sacrilege.On the surface the plot is a humid New Orleans noir thriller around a lengthy search for a serial killer full of looming violence, warped relationships, shadowy cops, twisted elites and derelict plantations. This is not a visual shocker indeed its brilliant writer Nic Pizzolatto admitted that he had "literally no interest in serial killers, no interest in trying to shock or gross people out with portrayals of gore". In every sense the show is far more concerned with bigger themes of the human condition and our individual meagre impact in universal terms. The monologues in the series on human nature and existence, time and space, love and morality and the possibility of forces of light and evil are a source of sheer genius.At the heart of "True Detective" are two master actors who both have their roots in comedy. Woody Harrelson has come a long way since the dimwitted saint "Woody" of the Cheers Bar. Here he is a deeply flawed macho "good ole boy" with good heart and traditional southern sensibilities. He plays Martin Hart a family man but a philanderer, he cannot abide questioning of God but he is not religious, he is driven by alcohol and a liar to his family. Harrelson's portrayal is rock solid and in any other series he would dominate proceedings. And yet by his is side in a dysfunctional cop partnership is "Rust Cohle" played by Matthew McConaughey. Quite when McConaughey blossomed from a rather average rom-com staple to one of America's greatest actors is hard to pinpoint. His performances in "Mud", "The Wolf of Wall Street" and his peerless lead in the "Dallas Buyers Club" have revealed an acting giant. Here as Cohle he is a crime fighting Nietzsche with a Southern drawl to die for and the torment of being an hallucinating insomniac far to clever for this world. He dominates the screen with such charisma that its difficult to part your gaze. The dialogue between Cohle and Hart is a masterclass of scriptwriting. It is often humorous, sometimes profound and perfectly executed. At one point Cohle tells Hart about his nihilistic view of the human predicament stating that "maybe the honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." He is a master interrogator of witnesses and casually informs a women confessor that "The newspapers are gonna be tough on you. And prison is very, very hard on people who hurt kids. If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself." It is difficult to convey the force of Cohle's words and that is because they must be heard passing through the lips of the superb McConaughey.Around these two actors are a superb cast and a particular mention should go to the impressive Michelle Monaghan as Hart's long suffering wife. Another star also present is the Louisiana landscape, the spooky Spanish moss, the boarded-up houses, the roads seemingly heading nowhere and the sub cultures of voodoo and carnival. Finally this is all topped off with T Bone Burnett's marvellous soundtrack ranging from artists like Lucinda Williams to Grinderman. There was once a time when it was cinema which advanced the art of form through the visual screen with brilliant directors like Scorcese, Cimino, Copella and Lucas. Today it is television and particularly the cutting edge network commissioning of HBO that rules the roost. They should be congratulated once again for "True Detective" is utterly magnetic television.

all complete and all good and came early

Great music, good story

Alas, after all the hype, True Detective has proved terribly disappointing, despite marvelous performances by Mathew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. One reviewer claimed the series "was never ever dull". He's got to be kidding! All those long, boring cockamamie soliloquies McConaughey has to deliver- over and over again - as detective Rust Cohle. Thank goodness for Harrelson's quips as his less high-falutin, down-to-earth sidekick, Marty Hart. Granted, the interaction between the two main characters is always fun. Rust as a nattering Nietsche uses a lot of fancy words and I loved it when, after he has tiresomely referred to humans as "sentient meat" over several episodes, Marty finally asks what that "scented meat" is he keeps on about.Then too, the story line can be hard to follow as it is narrated separately by the two detectives, and moves back and forth in time between 1995 and the present. Then on the eighth and last dvd, the finale! (Spoiler Alert!!) - We see Cohle endlessly walking through the labyrinth of an old abandoned brick fort bedecked with those scary twigs as he follows the directions of "The Monster". How can he hear him so distinctly? Are there hidden speakers everywhere in the ruins? Okay, tension is high but minutes go by. Then, one brutal fight. The monster dead. And that's it? All other mysteries are abandoned? And how could our guys have possibly survived such knife and hatchet wounds? Okay, medicine has made leaps and bounds over past years. Of course, I am not complaining. You can't help but love these two throughout the series. I didn't want them dead. But I am no longer waiting anxiously for Series Two, especially as McConaughey and Harrelson won't be in them.

Set in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana, this series present two Homicide Detectives, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) investigating mysterious disappearances from 1995 to 2012. Starting with the murder of prostitute Dora Lange, Hart and Cohle are puzzled by the crime scene: the victim has been blindfolded, crowned with deer's antlers and her body arranged as if she was praying in front of a tree.Cohle soon understands it is the work of a serial killer; however, the two Detectives are confronted to a constant erasing of clues, either from Nature (hurricanes, overabundant vegetation, closeness of water...) or from human interaction (drugs dealers, interfering politicians, corrupted religious leaders). Also, the two Detectives' opposite personalities make their investigation difficult: Hart is the hypocritical family man unable to resist chasing skirts whereas Cohle, intelligent but broken, cannot recover from the accidental death of his baby daughter and the use of drugs during a previous undercover mission. A major falling-out in 2002 will separate the two men, only to be reunited after having been interviewed by Detectives Thomas Papania (Tory Kittles) and Maynard Gilbough (Michael Potts): Hart and Cohle will join forces again to stop the serial killer, even at the cost of their lives...A very good series, with an intelligent plot and a set of fantastic male actors. However, writer Nic Pizzolatto has failed in creating strong female characters. The only women are stereotypes that can be found in any other cop TV show: prostitutes, stripers, empty-headed girlfriends, fed-up cop's wife... Michelle Monaghan as Maggie Hart is boring and her scene of revenge sex with her husband's partner is of the poorest taste. One can only hope Nic Pizzolatto will create a strong female character for the second series of True Detectives!