It may be unfair to judge “True Detective” on the trend of its first half. Scenes of Hart trailing a suspect’s girlfriend to a backcountry rave of Hart and Cohle silently moving around Cohle’s apartment as he prepares to go back undercover and of a chaotic robbery that turns into a race riot are crisp, stylish and exciting. Harrelson: There are some nice moments in the later episodes, and they’re the ones with the fewest words. His other feature, “Sin Nombre,” which he wrote himself, had some of the same heavy-handed loginess that begins to envelop “True Detective,” and he doesn’t show much ability here to animate Mr. He demonstrated a lot of talent in the excellent 2011 “Jane Eyre,” but, in that case, he was working with a fine, fast-paced, pared-down screenplay (by Moira Buffini). Fukunaga, who’s working in TV for the first time after directing two feature films. (He’s not alone, though: Michelle Monaghan, who’s good as Maggie, Hart’s long-suffering wife, gets this awkward gem when Hart tells Maggie he’s stopped cheating: “You think your betrayal’s removed by its interruption?”)Īs “True Detective” really starts to settle into an arty stasis in the third and fourth episodes, your focus might shift to Mr. This flashback structure, which could have been cumbersome and distracting, is impressively seamless. As the clues are gathered in the original case, we are given clues about what went wrong with it. Pizzolatto adds texture to the story by telling it on two tracks: in 1995, when Cohle and Hart begin their investigation, and in 2012, when the case has been reopened, and both are being questioned by a second set of detectives. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. Harrelson), a glad-handing, philandering local officer who resents Cohle’s intellectualism but appreciates his investigative skills, is amusingly drawn. The relationship between Cohle and his new partner, Martin Hart (Mr. Pizzolatto’s writing - two complete scripts and an outline of the season - and, in the pilot, you can understand what HBO thought it had. “True Detective,” which has been announced as an anthology (next season: new story, new cast), was sold on the basis of Mr. Which leads us to that second pair: Nic Pizzolatto, the show’s creator, who wrote all eight episodes, and Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed them. This remains true even when the material fails him, as it does with increasing frequency in the four episodes provided for review. McConaughey, who continues the recent winning streak he began with the 2011 film “The Lincoln Lawyer.” His contained, assured, watchful performance as Rust Cohle, a former narcotics detective from Texas whose cynicism and single-mindedness make him a pariah among his new colleagues, is a pleasure to watch. Upfront, and drawing all the attention, are the movie stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, playing a mismatched team of Louisiana state cops.Īnd if there’s a compelling reason to watch “True Detective,” they provide it, particularly Mr. The success of HBO’s new Sunday night crime drama, “True Detective,” depends on two pairs of men, a couple of veterans and a couple of relative rookies.
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