True Detective Review

The first season is the whole argument. Pizzolatto writes Rust Cohle as a pessimist with a working vocabulary and hands him to Matthew McConaughey at the exact moment he could carry it, while Woody Harrelson does the harder job of making Marty's mediocrity specific rather than generic. Fukunaga shoots Louisiana as chemical flares and drowned fields, and the six-minute long take in episode four, moving through a housing-project raid into a firefight and out to a waiting car, is genuine staging rather than a stunt.

The 1995 and 2012 timelines interleave so the interrogation itself becomes suspense. Then the solution arrives, a groundskeeper in a hedge maze, and it is smaller than everything built to reach it. Season two suffocates under too many plots and too little air, season three recovers most of the register on Mahershala Ali's back, and Night Country finds a colder variation. Graded across the anthology, the craft ceiling is extraordinary and the consistency is not, which is exactly what an A describes.