Among the many innovations that The Wire brought to TV was its much-vaunted ‘novelistic structure’. Its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns (who between them had worked as a journalist, a cop and a teacher) admitted that this was intentional, and redoubled their commitment by hiring actual novelists to sit on the production and writing staff. One of those novelists, Dennis Lehane, has since moved on to write for Boardwalk Empire, again alongside other authors. Elsewhere, the reason for Deadwood’s distinctively poetic language lies in the fact that its creator, David Milch, is a former English literature lecturer. The show’s influences are obvious but well chosen. The central crime shares a great deal of similarity with events in last year’s Hannibal, which was itself derived from the long term trend of focusing on the psychology of the perpetrator and of those employed to catch him. Even the title of the show recalls the pulp magazines of the twentieth century, but that too is probably intentional. True Detective, like the James Ellroy works that it partly resembles, is the inheritor of the tradition of hardboiled crime writing. The murder is gruesome and done for an as yet obscure motive while the cops are gruff, bitter and weary, perhaps raging inwardly at the world but content for now to take it out on each other instead. They do so quietly, keeping their aggression, like their emotions, firmly buttoned down. Like all the best cop fiction, True Detective is definitively about the cops. The plot concerns a murder perpetrated, investigated and (we’re told) solved in 1995. The two lead detectives, Louisiana state cops Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) have both since left the force and are being interviewed about the case in the present day in short, intimate scenes that punctuate the main flashback narrative. It’s a neat device that allows Pizzolatto to explore the content of his characters’ thoughts as much as demonstrating their actions and gives the show its most obvious novelistic conceit. There won’t be many such offers. His fellow detectives nickname him ‘Taxman’, on account of the fact that he takes crime scene notes in a large ledger rather than a policeman’s notebook, but it’s just as likely a reflection of his popularity at the station. Unsmiling throughout, he comes across like a man whose understanding of human interaction is drawn entirely from a now-discredited textbook with half the pages torn out. The show’s central mystery is not ‘who killed Dora Lang?’ but ‘what the hell is going on in Rust Cohle’s head?’ It’s a damn good question and one that would make Hart the lead detective. He’s barely more peppy than his partner and although Harrelson is given the episode’s funniest lines, they’re a bitter, world-weary kind of funny. He is, by his own admission, ‘just a regular Joe with a big-ass dick’, but that’s, typically it would seem, an underestimation. Hart is no idiot; he’s perspicacious enough to see through his partner as well as anyone else and, while he remains to be sold on Cohle’s Will Graham-esque theorising, is a smart and capable detective. His steady home life is presented in stark contrast to that of his partner, who is freighted with grief for his own family and possibly his own sanity. The episode’s central set-piece (if it can even be called that) is a dinner at Hart’s house to which his wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) insists that Cohle is invited. It’s another cop drama staple, Lethal Weapon’s Riggs and Murtaugh ate together, as did Seven’s Mills and Somerset, but it’s used well, unpicking a little more of Cohle’s anti-personality while giving Hart something to be genuinely irritated by. We’ll be covering True Detective episode-by-episode. Spoilers will be switched on from next week. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
