Top Ten TV Shows of 2014

THE GREGARIOUS MISANTHROPE'S TOP TEN TV SHOWS OF 2014

Everyone's posting their Top Ten of 2014 lists, so here's my Top 10 TV Shows of 2014. Note that only one of these shows is on network television, a bona fide sign that nearly everything worth watching is behind some kind of pay wall. What that means for the future of TV I can only guess.

1. True Detective (HBO): Haven't been so captivated by a show since Deadwood. Even the slightly flubbed ending couldn't ruin it for me. I fell in love with the atheist anti-natalist ramblings of Rust Cohle: Matthew McConaughey deserved the Emmy for his mesmerizing performance (sorry/not sorry, Bryan Cranston). Woody Harrelson provided a perfect counterpoint as Marty Hart, the bluff family man whose heart was just as full of darkness as his partner's. Despite some flubs in the finale, I have to pay True Detective my highest compliment: I envy those who have never seen it because they can watch it for the first time. It was that good.

Here's my review of True Detective in Broad Street Review.

Just watching HBO's "Introducing Rust Cohle" video made me want to rewatch the whole show. If you don't mind spoilers, go on YouTube and look up the six minute one-take tracking shot from Episode Six to see why Cary Fukunaga won the Emmy for Best Director.

SIDEBAR: Based on all the Yellow King/Robert Chambers/Thomas Ligotti/HP Lovecraft fanwanking around True Detective, TV is ripe for a real show about the Cthulhu mythos, though. Networks take note.

2. Orange is the New Black (Netflix): There is no better ensemble cast on TV right now. Dare you to watch this and think that women in prison are so different from you and those you care about. I love the supporting characters more than the ostensible protagonist, and this season rightly focused more on them rather than Piper. This season followed a satisfying arc, though I hope Jenji Kohan accepts viewer feedback and stops spending valuable air time on Larry and Polly, who everyone despises.

My Broad Street Review piece in praise of female anti-heroes, which discusses Orange is the New Black, Vikings, and Orphan Black.

Despite their myriad offenses, you will love all these characters. Well, maybe not Vee...

3. Louie (FX): The most intense, blackest comedy on TV right now. Louis CK bravely broke from traditional comedy formatting with several mini-movies, one of which was entirely flashbacks. This show is the pinnacle of cringecore TV, depicting the loserish heart of a middle aged man with unflinching honesty and intensity. I have nothing but admiration for his work this season. 

Witness this Fantastic rant by Sarah Baker in the episode "So Did the Fat Lady." This is representative of the incisively painful comedy Louis CK delivered this season.

4. Hannibal (NBC): This show transcends the crappy movies with Anthony Hopkins. Mads Mikkelsen is a bespoke, precise, magnetic Hannibal Lecter who will scare the living daylights out of you. You will not see anything more daring, graphic, or visually lush anywhere on TV, either now or in years past. The sick chemistry between Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, who plays Will Graham, is better than most romances gracing the screen. The most disturbing and horrifying shit is on display here, and it's NETWORK TV. 

My review of Hannibal on Broad Street Review.

Oh yes, this is Hannibal Lecter cooking a dude's leg and eating it, and looking sharp while doing it.

5. Rectify (Sundance): Slow, soulful show about Daniel Holden, a man wrongfully convicted of rape and murder who is exonerated by DNA evidence. But to his hometown, and some of his family, he is still guilty. Season Two picks up after Daniel is violently assaulted by the murder victim's brother, and depicts his continued persecution and the heartache of his family. This show requires patience and careful viewing. The acting is full of nuance and the story is heartbreaking and beautifully told. You owe it to yourself to watch this. 

From the first episode of Season 2, a conversation between Daniel Holden and his former cellmate, who is now dead. This gives you an idea of Daniel's personality and the quality of the acting. Start with Season 1 though, if you're not currently a fan.

6. Fargo (FX): An absorbing story that pays homage to the original while telling its own baroque tale of crime and punishment in the great white north. Martin Freeman plays schlubby Lester Nygaard, who gets in touch with his inner psychopath with the help of Lorne Malvo (Thornton gives us an ice cold psycho with a twisted sense of humor). But my favorite character on the show is the dogged Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman). She is, as Lester Freamon from The Wire would say, natural police.

The first seven minutes of Fargo. It's a wild ride from here.

7. Penny Dreadful (Showtime): Yes, this show has vampires, Frankenstein's monster, a werewolf, a medium, and Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray. My expectations were low, but the show won me over. The luminous Eva Green was born to play Vanessa Ives, a tortured Gothic anti-heroine who channels monsters and demons from both within and without. There hasn't been a more epic depiction of possession since Linda Blair, so she better get an Emmy nomination. Artful and at times terrifying-- I expected this show to be a derivative joke, but I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Nice comeback for Josh Harnett.

My review of Penny Dreadful in Broad Street Review.

Here's the official trailer. Eva Green's performance is what puts this show over the top.

8. Vikings (History Channel): My uncritical fun favorite--not even a guilty pleasure because I feel no guilt. Ragnar Lothbrok (played by former underwear model Travis Fimmel) is a bad ass Viking reaver, but so is his ex-wife, Lagertha, now an earl in her own right. It could have fallen victim to soap operatic love triangle nonsense, but instead of that, it shows a respectful relationship between Ragnar's first and second wives. This isn't serious TV, though it's a lot better than I expected. Came for the hot guys with swords, stayed for the kick ass women and rollicking violence. What's not to love?

Shirtless hot Vikings fighting in water. What more can a girl ask for?

9. The Missing (STARZ): This grim, wrenching tale of a father's odyssey to find out the truth about his lost son is the stuff of nightmares. But it's so well done that I am white knuckling it to the conclusion. The Missing flashes from 2006, when five year old Oliver Hughes is abducted, to 2014, when his father Tony finally makes some breakthroughs on the cold case. James Nesbitt's depiction Tony's often unhinged fury has the ring of truth for me. If my kid went missing, that crazy person would be me, with similar disastrous results. The ending hurt my soul: you've been warned.

James Nesbitt's eyebrows should have their own Emmy category.

10. Transparent (Amazon Prime): Jeffrey Tambor is excellent as trans woman Maura Pfefferman who has to come out to her self-absorbed, dysfunctional kids. There is no canonization of anyone here, not even Maura, who is by turns wise and selfish in her journey to finding herself. But all of the Pfeffermans are flailing about, trying to figure out who they are, and their narcissism isn't helping. This is another show that makes me cringe as I watch the characters treat themselves and each other badly. Maybe I like cringing... this list certainly makes it seem so.

Mort Pfferman finally has a name for his real identity: Maura, given to him by Bradley Whitford in drag.

HONORABLE MENTION: Orphan Black (Syfy): Season Two fell of a bit from the quality of Season 1, but the fact that this show did not crack my Top 10 tells you how much great TV was on offer this year. Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah Manning and her many clones. Her acting alone elevates this show from sci-fi camp into the realm of serious TV, though at times the plot twists were silly. Worth watching if you like tough, clever female anti-heroes and can suspend some disbelief for the sake of an overly complex but often absorbing plot.

Tatiana Maslany has been sadly unrecognized by the Emmys, which only seems to give awards to people who've already gotten them. It's a shame, because she's giving one of the best performances on TV.

Best Standalone Miniseries: Olive Kitteridge (HBO). I suppose True Detective and Fargo are technically miniseries, but they're actually chapters in an anthology, while this is an extended movie.

Enough hair splitting. In any case, Olive Kitteridge was my favorite TV miniseries of the year. My love for Frances McDormand goes way back, and she knocks it out of the park with her portrayal of the title character. Olive might have been just a foul-tempered shrew, but McDormand humanizes her. I can almost imagine myself turning out like Olive: a bitter old teacher with a heart of tarnished gold, whose pathological bluntness alienates everyone.

Notably not on this list: The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Breaking Bad. Because I'm tired of shows that unreflectively depict violence and sexism, and which showcase fan service over the truth of the characters.

Yes, Breaking Bad was a great show, but I hated the final episode so much that I can't put it on my list. I'm probably being unfair about that, considering how great "Ozymandias" was. I wish "Granite State," with some modifications, had been the final episode, but the writers lacked the courage to have Walter White meet the a fate as grim as the rest of the show. I wanted him to go out in ignominy, but instead he got a glorious death. You don't have to agree with me (no one does, it seems) but hey. It's my list.

I go off on the Breaking Bad finale here, among other things.

Haunted House Bingo/Drinking Game

In honor of Halloween, I watched a bunch of haunted house movies, and found them all to be eerily similar. With a little contemplation, I figured out why. I wrote about it for Broad Street review: "Haunted House, Haunted Family." And I also made a fun little BINGO game, or drinking game if such things drive you to hit the sauce. Enjoy.

Haunted House Bingo

A child in distress	Old pictures/diaries/ newspapers/ letters related to the haunting are found	Going into the basement or attic	Sleepwalking/ lost time	A psychic friend arrives
A creepy doll, toy, or random ball rolling around	The family pet freaks out	Doors that open or shut by themselves/ furniture with a life of its own	Info-dumpy  exposition explains the nature of the supernatural disturbance	"Faulty wiring" causes the lights to blink
A friend or animal scares you and you think it’s the ghost	A Catholic priest arrives	They stay in the house long past when a normal family would leave	A camera exists that can take pictures of ghosts	A murder took place there some time in the past
Scary/creepy music (with or without creepy music box)	Someone gets possessed by a ghost	You think it’s over but… nooooo!	Grossness: blood on the walls or in the toilet, disgusting insects	Hapless red shirt who dies
A hidden or secret room	It’s built on top of a cemetery/ burial ground	A team of ghostbusters with funky equipment	Disembodied footsteps/ laughter/ screaming	A parent with a secret

True Detective Mid Season breakdown: The Crushed Beer Can of Life

"Did you ever wake up to find
A day that broke up your mind?
Destroyed your notion of circular time?
It's just that demon life that got you in its sway."
~The Rolling Stones

Five episodes into True Detective and it's finally all coming together for me. Say it with me now:

RED.

HERRING.

In Episode 5, "The Secret Fate of All Life," our shambling philosopher/genius/madman/true dick Rust Cohle expounds upon the thesis espoused by pedophile meth cook Reggie Ledoux: time is a flat circle.  Now, what Marty said about Cohle is doubly true about Ledoux: trust me, you don't want to pick this man's brain (a task made much easier when Hart blasts it out of his skull). But Ledoux offers the viewers the key to the whole thing: all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

Let me backtrack.

In most police procedurals about serial killers, the build up to catching the bad guy is the meat and potatoes of the show. We've been waiting for the confrontation with Ledoux since we heard about the shoot out in the woods, anticipation that was only sharpened by the sight three weeks ago of Reggie in his tighty whiteys with a machete and gas mask. But Ledoux is apprehended pretty quickly in this episode, then blown away by Marty when he finds the two horribly abused children Ledoux and his partner Dewall have been holding prisoner. They concoct a colorful story about a dramatic shoot out, which explains their bond, a bond that lasts through a seven year partnership.Marty never told on Rust for stealing coke and participating in a gangland stick up, and Rust helped him hide his bad shooting.  They are the keepers of each others' secrets.

Reggie Ledoux was a red herring.

(Check out those tats close up... I know that AB stands for Aryan Brotherhood, but just maybe it's also a little shout out to Ambrose Bierce? Nah, But the octopus swatiska just might be a Cthulhu reference...)

In the seven years between 1995 and the Hart/Cohle falling out in 2002, both detective are still dining out on the Ledoux case. Marty got a promotion, and used his heroics to convince Maggie to take him back. Rust gains respect on the force and falls in love with Laurie, a learned doctor who seems to really get him. All seems well. But this delusion of happiness is destroyed by an acne-pocked stick up boy named Guy Leonard Francis. While confessing to a double murder in a pharmacy, Francis tells Rust that he remembers the Dora Lange case, and he's got some news for Rust. They got the wrong guy. The Yellow King, the man with scars on his face-- he's still at large. Still killing, by the grace of very powerful men who are also involved and who are covering for him.

Rust loses his cool for the first time at the dawning horror that he and Marty made a mistake. Maybe if Marty hadn't capped Ledoux, this info would have come out in 1995, but... hmmm. Too late now. We saw that Reggie had the devil nets all over his creepy meth compound, so we know that Reggie has connections to the Yellow King. He mentions the black stars and Carcosa, which were present in Dora Lange's diary too, and tattooed both on Ledoux's body and on the neck of Dora Lange's friend. They are all connected. This thing is big.

Of course Rust wants to share this intel with Marty, but when they go to see Guy Francis in lock up, they find that he's dead. Slit his own wrists on the edge of his bunk and bled out after receiving a phone call from his "lawyer." Again... hmmmm.

Now we come to the crux of this whole thing: Papania and Gilbough, the 2012 detectives, think that Rust is the serial killer. Why do they believe this? Marty demands to know, and face it, we've all been wondering. Well, they have some evidence. Cohle disappeared from 2002 to 2010, and when he reappeared, Billy Lee Tuttle, the bigwig Christian cousin of the governor, OD'd on prescription drugs. Convenient. Cohle is the one who connected the dots between Marie Fontenot, Rianne Olivier, and Dora Lange. He's the one who was so hot on catching Ledoux, and then Ledoux dies before he can testify about anything. He's the one whose story about visiting his dad doesn't add up. AND they have photos of him outside the house of the latest victim, Stephanie Kordish, who was murdered while suspended by ropes, where he was seen 5 times by 5 different witnesses.  Plus, Rust has a storage unit that he won't let anyone into.

Red herring, folks. Big, stinking red herring.

"You've given me a lot to absorb," Marty says. Amen to that. But let's think about this a minute. If we can believe that the flashbacks in this story are real, then we know that Rust isn't the culprit. He asks Ledoux moments before he's killed, "Why the antlers?" If he was Dora's killer, would he ask that when no one else is around? How could Cohle be changing all the unsolved disappearances to "Made in Error" cases? Those cases dated all the way back to 1978, when surely Cohle was not a cop, and if he was, definitely not one whose reach extended far enough for a cover up of that magnitude. Would he investigate Francis's death, proving that his "lawyer" called from a random pay phone? Would he go out to Tuttle's abandoned school and handle, albeit with gloves, all the devil nets? He finds a mural depicting cherubs killing a person suspended in the air, just as Stephanie Kordish would be 10 years later. The outside of the building is covered in black stars. It is the monster's lair, one that Rust would have walked into seven years earlier if Marty hadn't called him away with extreme urgency to hare off after Ledoux.

So what the hell is really going on? Here's my theory:

Rust is undercover again.

We, the audience, are all suffering from what Marty calls "the detective's curse": inattention. We aren't seeing what is right in front of our faces.

When Marty talks of inattention, he's talking about his failure to appreciate his seven years of happiness between 1995 and 2002, happiness that is destroyed by his daughter Audrey's promiscuous sexuality and Goth rebellion. Audrey is the same child who reenacted rape with her Barbies, and who drew graphic pictures of sex when she was but a little girl. Audrey, who had a ribboned crown that she threw into a tree, where it wore away to tatters in eerie parallel to the devil net that Rust finds in the tree where Dora Lange was killed. The Yellow King went back to that tree and left a wreath that looks creepily vaginal, and he put up another devil net to replace the one that Rust cut down. A great point is made to juxtapose those images so that we get the wrenching sense that there is a connection. What are we going to learn about Audrey? Where is she in 2012? Hmmmm?

(Yes, there is a freaking SPIRAL on the wall among the kids' drawings. A SPIRAL. I didn't notice it the first time through either, don't feel bad. Thank god for the internet)

I freely admit that Audrey might be another red herring. Time will tell, and I digress. We were talking about Rust and how he has misdirected us, just as he's misdirecting everyone. Let's start paying attention. We have enough information now to put it together. 2012 Rust knows exactly what's been happening in the backwoods of Louisiana for over three decades now. He discovers the cover up of hundreds of disappearances. Someone knows who the vulnerable people are, the ones who will accept that their lost children will never be found, or their lost daughters. Rust finds the shrine in Tuttle's school and goes back to the killing tree to find a taunt from the Yellow King. By the time he goes off the grid in 2002, I believe he has the answers but not the means to prove anything. He has reason to fear for his life: look at what happened to Francis, and maybe also to Ledoux and Dewall.

Time is a flat circle. Everything we've done, we've done before and will do again. This is both a philosophical exposition on membrane theory and a huge hint from Rust to the uncomprehending Papania and Gilbough, and to us, the inattentive viewers. We have all read the pulp detective stories, seen the movies, read the books. We know that the villain is our unreliable narrator friend, the one we've come to trust. Right? RIGHT?

Wrong.

We know the lengths that Rust will go to hide himself when he's investigating a far reaching crime. He has played the role of a wasted ruin before, when he was Crash the junkie biker for four years. The Yellow King case is far bigger than the cartel case, so the cover has to be deeper and more elaborate. In fact, it's a bit of a Verbal Kint if you ask me. Make yourself look pathetic so that the cops will mistake you for something you're not. But like Kint, Rust has a tell-- the flask he uses. That was the Crash flask, one he kept in his cover kit that he busted out in the last episode. In fact, Rust has sacrificed his real life, probably his relationship with Laurie, and definitely his career, to go so deep that is cover is indistinguishable from who he really is.

(Sidebar: when asked what happened between Rust and Laurie, Marty says, "Reality." How right he was. Rust doesn't believe man can love, so he was just acting out of his programming when he got involved with Laurie. Since he is an anti-natalist, and he told Maggie that the only reason men and women come together is children, his relationship with Laurie was doomed from the start. Reality for Rust is that happiness is an illusion. Sorry, Laurie.)

Ledoux says that he dreamed of Rust, who is now in Carcosa. In the Ambrose Bierce story, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa," a ghost doesn't realize that he is a ghost, and that his beloved city of Carcosa has been dead and gone a long time. What did Cohle do during his decade as a ghost? What nightmarish terrors did he experience as he read his version of Chambers' play "The King in Yellow"? Maybe we'll find out, maybe not. Maybe what we imagine will be worse than anything we could be shown, as is always true in Lovecraftian horror. Did Cohle resurface to take out Tuttle, only to find, to his chagrin, that the murders have continued?

I'm not sure if Cohle is leading Gilbough and Papania on, making them think he is crazier than he is. Did he mean to be seen at Stephanie Kordish's house? Would he be so sloppy to be seen with his truck in front of the house of a future victim? Is he truly surprised to be called in and accused? I tend to err on the side of deliberate action by Cohle, but I'm not sure yet.

Here's what I haven't figured out: is Marty in on it? Is he Cohle's ally, also in deep cover? This could be possible. They sure seem to have each other's backs in 2012. It's possible they are both still working this case from different angles.

Or is Marty one of the bad guys? I need to rewatch the previous episodes for a third time, but who first brought up Ledoux's name as a suspect? What I am sure of is, it was Marty who called Rust away from Tuttle's school when he was about to walk in there-- called him away with intel on where Ledoux could be found. HMMMM. Marty, who admitted to Cohle that he'd gotten a 10 point buck some time in 1995. Antlers? Hart? Get it? Marty, whose daughter shows clear signs of abuse. Marty, who was a company man if ever we saw one. Something is going on here; something horrifying.

It will be interesting to see how the falling out between Rust and Marty unfolds. I don't believe anything Rust does is by accident. My theory is that the break up of their bromance will be engineered by Rust to seem natural. Rust needs a clean getaway from the police force, one that doesn't raise suspicion. He doesn't trust Marty, and if he doesn't trust Marty, then neither do I. I'm not saying Marty is the Yellow King. I'm saying he might be complicit.

Or maybe Marty's involvement is yet another red herring. Maybe I'm falling into the same trap as Papania and Gilbough, adding up all the clues in the wrong way. Maybe he will be as surprised as anyone when he finds out his daughter is somehow involved in all this. Anything is possible.

I have a theory about the Yellow King that I'm going to go out on a limb and share. It's probably totally wrong. Maybe the Yellow King isn't one particular person. Maybe it's a role, one that's passed from person to person over the years, or from murder to murder. The scars could be ritual scarification that one undergoes when taking on the role, or could be a mask one wears while acting as Yellow King. This would dovetail nicely with Thomas Ligotti's belief that all human identities are false faces, are masks, and that underneath the mask, there's nothing. That's why Cohle says that nothing is ever solved, nothing is ever over. There is never any closure. The Yellow King can't be caught. You get rid of one, another takes his place. It's a flat circle, and we will go around and around, never getting anywhere.

Edited to add: there are five Lone Star beer can men. Five men on horseback around Dora Lange in that creepy picture her mother had. Five male action figures (one without a face) standing around the naked female doll in Audrey Hart's little tableau. The ten point buck antlers-- five points per antler. Five witnesses to Cohle at the Kordish crime scene. There are five men operating here, not one. Can't believe I didn't notice this sooner.

Who might be the five men? Billy Lee Tuttle. Ted Childress, who was sheriff when Marie Fontenot went missing (the prison guard who took Guy Francis to use the phone was also named Childress).  Marty's father-in-law. Reverend Theriot. The mysterious Miles, the leader of the Iron Crusaders. I'm just making this up.

The End of the Television Anti-Hero (I wish)

My take on why the TV anti-hero is a tired old trope that isn't being done well even by the best-written shows, recently published in the Broad Street Review:

The End of the Television Anti-Hero

True Detective: Too Good to be True?

Did the world need another TV show about police officers investigating a serial killer? Especially one where a woman is killed with antlers on her head? Did we need another beautiful, tortured man with a dark past who can see into the soul of a monster, maybe a little too well?  Say it in the voice of Butters from South Park--Hannibal did it!

Obviously my answer would normally be NO. I have been pretty open about my frustration with the way TV finds a formula that works and then drives it into the ground, especially with regard to the anti-hero protagonist, and the proliferation of America's serial killer fetish in popular media. Despite all those caveats, I still love HBO's show True Detective. So far, anyway.

As you can see in the pictures below, the surface parallels between Hannibal  and True Detective are rather obvious: the antlers, the tree ornaments, the serial killers, the tortured protagonist who doesn't get along with anyone, has odd insights and hallucinations, etc. However, at its heart, Hannibal is a visually stylish (and food porny) police procedural, with a Monster of the Week, extreme gross outs, and its frustratingly horrifying relationships between Hannibal and, well, everybody. True Detective is nothing like that. If Hannibal is a dark fantasy, then True Detective is gritty, post-modern noir. I wonder if the creators of True Detective shook their fists at the TV and shouted NOOOOOOOOOO! when they saw Hannibal. I know I would have. But no matter. True Detective and Hannibal really don't have much in common beyond some eerily similar images. 

Don't worry about this review containing spoilers. Two episodes in, there's really nothing much to spoil. Ostensibly, the show is about an investigation into a serial killing that takes place in rural Louisiana in 1995, The premise of the show is that detectives in 2012 are interviewing the two leads from the case in 1995, for reasons still unknown. The victim is a prostitute who has antlers tied to her head and a spiral symbol drawn on her back. There are strange little sculptures made of sticks at the scene of the crime. We can see that there is a monster lurking behind all the little clues and hints in the narrative. It's like a horror movie where you just see the end of a tail slithering around a corner or into a closet, or hear the clicking of claws in the darkness.  The brilliance of True Detective lies with the fact that it is not really a story about police work. The surface plot is just a stage setting for an exploration of the horror that lies inside its two leads. Even a cursory glance at the detective characters hints at the fact that this is meant to be a meta-narrative: their names are Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart.

Cohle is the aforementioned beautiful man with a horrible past who is using his police work as a way to exorcise his own demons. Yawn, right? His partner, Hart, is the self-described "regular type guy with the big-ass dick." It's a buddy cop show then, the odd couple trope trotted out once again. Nope, and that's all down the the excellent writing by Nic Pizzolatto, and the nuanced, intricate performances by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

McConaughey's Cohle is a sensitive philosopher mystic who isn't afraid to beat the crap out of an informant, slap a rude co-worker, call out the religious hypocrisy of the police Major, or buy downers from a prostitute.  Everyone is constantly telling him to shut up. Harrelson's Hart, who knows how to play the police work game, is freaked out by Cohle's nihilistic pronouncements. But it is these very pronouncements that make me love Cohle. In Episode 2, he says that choosing to have a child, "to yank a soul of non-existence into this meat," is the ultimate act of selfishness, and that the best thing the human race could do is just opt out of reproducing and do the world a favor. I think I have used almost identical words when discussing the plight of our overpopulated world. It's eerie how often I heard things coming out of Cohle's mouth that I have thought or said about the human race. So it's impossible for me not to fall a little bit in love with him, which I imagine is the intention of Pizzolatto

Rustin Cohle reminds me of nobody so much as Darl Bundren of As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Darl and Rust share a hallucinatory, shamanistic hyper-awareness of the world. They have the same penchant for perceiving underlying truths about people and the world, and the obnoxious tendency to say aloud what lies inside other people's secret hearts (Harts?). People hate that, and it is a source of friction between Cohle and just about everyone. Though he's a brilliant detective, Cohle's job is perpetually in jeopardy. He sees it all and can't keep quiet about it. There is no room inside him for such repression, coping as he is with deep personal loss and trauma. The man doesn't sleep. He only dreams, unless he drugs those dreams into submission. By 2012, he silences his own voice with alcohol and is a shambling ruin of a man. 

The modern day Hart looks much the same as the 1995 version (though with less hair), and alludes to a falling out between him and Cohle. In retrospect, Hart states that he respected Cohle because he was smart and knew how to work a case: real police, as McNulty from The Wire would say. But the way Cohle punctures his rationalizations and denial drives him to ecstasies of rage, because for all Hart's protests about being a regular guy, he's got his own demons. The job takes its toll on him and it undermines everything he claims to love about his life. Ain't that always the way? 

What I find so interesting about this show is how McConaughey and Harrelson have transformed themselves for these roles. I have been following Matthew McConaughey's career since Wooderson in Dazed and Confused in 1993, though the cheesy rom-com/leading man wasteland of the early Aughts, and I can honestly say I have never found him attractive. Before you ask me, no, not even as Dallas in Magic Mike. But I do find him attractive in True Detective, because he doesn't look like the cartoon of himself that he'd become. Yes, it's McConaughey, but there's something about the hair, the make up, the way he holds his face, and his voice, that is entirely different from anything I've seen him in before. All of his previous works have relied on the sly smile, the implied wink and flamboyant, sleazy charm. Not this one. Without it, I barely recognize him. He looks more like a young Robert Mitchum  than a Lincoln lawyer. His performance as Cohle is tightly controlled, coiled, and reflective. The man smoulders. A star turn if ever I saw one.

On the other hand, I have had a thing for Woody Harrelson since Natural Born Killers in 1994. He has come a long way since he played Woody on Cheers, that's for sure. Interestingly, he and McConaughey have had parallel career issues. They both burst out strong early in their careers only to fall into lame movie purgatory for about a decade. Now, mid-career, they are finding their legs as character actors in roles where they aren't afraid to be dark. As Martin Hart, Harrelson affects this toothy voice and bluff manner that make him a good ole boy incarnate. But the job gets to him, and his rage is simmering under the surface, which is where he wants to keep it. He even says something about his father, who fought in the Korean War, and the fact that he never talked about it, because back then men did not talk about their pain. This is apparently a virtue to him, but it's awfully hard for him to repress his feelings when he has someone like Cohle throwing them in his face. Just as the viewer knows that this murder case is headed towards a major confrontation, so we feel the tension between Cohle and Hart winding tight as a spring.

Of course, the ending of a show makes or breaks it for me. I have denounced shows with which I was previously obsessed for years on the basis of a lame, contrived, fan service ending. I don't want to be pandered to. I want to be genuinely surprised, but most of all, I want to be satisfied that the characters I've come to love get to be who they are right up to the bitter end, no matter where that takes them. I sincerely hope that True Detective's ending justifies my love. So often, characters are shoehorned into behavior and choices that are not true to their natures. Pizzolatto has privileged character over plot, a choice of which I approve when the characters are as captivating as these. It takes courage to let the characters dictate the ending and not the plot. We'll see how true these detectives really are.