True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (S1E1, 2014) Review

A woman kneeling in a Louisiana cane field, dead, wearing antlers, arranged. Two men who no longer speak to each other are interviewed separately about it seventeen years later, and neither of them is telling the truth.

The 9 is for an hour that builds a structure most series would spend a season earning. Three time periods, two unreliable accounts, a case, and a relationship between two men who disagree about the nature of existence while driving.

What the episode does better than almost any pilot is establish that the interviews are the subject. The 1995 material is illustration, and what matters is which parts they choose to narrate and which parts the pictures contradict.

The Frame Is the Show

Two detectives sit in separate rooms in 2012 and describe a case to younger officers whose purpose is not immediately disclosed.

Everything the audience sees from 1995 is nominally their testimony, which means every image is already compromised. When Cohle describes arriving at a scene, the audience is watching a version he is supplying.

The 2012 interviewers are also doing something the episode withholds. Two detectives asking careful questions about an old case, taking notes, returning to specific dates, and the reason for any of it is not disclosed for several hours.

The episode is careful to demonstrate this early. Hart describes his marriage in terms that the corresponding footage does not support, and the discrepancy is small enough that a viewer might miss it and specific enough that it is a statement of method.

That device does two things at once. It supplies suspense about the past and about the present simultaneously, because the audience is asking both what happened and why these two are being asked about it now.

Two Philosophies in a Car

The long drives are the episode’s most distinctive material and they are conversations about whether human consciousness was a mistake.

Cohle talks and Hart does not want him to. That is the joke and it is also the structure, because the audience is placed with Hart, hearing a colleague deliver a worldview at length on a working day.

Pizzolatto’s dialogue in these sequences has been mocked, imitated and parodied since, and the mockery is partly deserved and mostly misses what the scenes are doing. Cohle is not being presented as correct. He is a man who says things like this in a car to somebody who has to be there, and the show knows exactly how insufferable that is.

Hart’s replies are the calibration. He asks Cohle to stop, points out that nobody wants to hear it, and observes that a person who thinks this should probably not say it out loud, which is the audience’s position articulated inside the scene.

The exchange also establishes the season’s actual argument, which is between a man who believes nothing and a man who believes in a set of arrangements he is continuously violating. Neither position survives the eight episodes intact.

McConaughey and Harrelson

The 1995 and 2012 versions of both men are effectively four performances and each one is distinct.

Cohle in 1995 is precise, tightly held, physically contained and almost entirely without affect. Cohle in 2012 has long hair, a beer at eleven in the morning, and is visibly enjoying making the interviewers uncomfortable. The gap between them is the story and the episode does not explain a moment of it.

The detail the episode plants and does not press is that 2012 Cohle asks for beer before he will continue, and gets it, which means the interviewers need something from him badly enough to negotiate.

Harrelson has the harder role and it took the full season for that to be understood. Hart is the ordinary one, which means he is the one doing the lying, and the ordinary register is what makes the lying invisible.

The physical work is precise in both timelines. McConaughey’s stillness in 1995 and his slouch in 2012 are two different bodies, and Harrelson ages through weight, posture and a haircut instead of through prosthetics.

McConaughey was also in the middle of a career reversal that this season completed. Three years earlier he had been a romantic comedy lead, and the decision to cast him against that history is doing work the series never has to mention.

Louisiana

Cary Fukunaga directed all eight episodes and shot this one in a specific way that the series never abandons.

Enormous wide shots of flat country, refineries burning on horizons, water on both sides of every road, and a helicopter shot early in the episode that establishes the whole geography as a landscape somebody has used up.

The location is doing thematic work without commentary. Churches, chemical plants, trailers, cane fields and schools that closed, all within a few miles, and the episode simply films them.

There is a single aerial shot early on, moving across a landscape of water, industry and nothing, which tells the audience more about the season’s subject than any dialogue in it does.

What that produces is a case that belongs somewhere. The murder is not transferable to another state, and the specificity of the place is why the season’s larger subject about institutions works when it arrives.

The tent revival sequence is the clearest statement of that. A congregation in a field under canvas, filmed with no condescension at all, while Cohle delivers a contemptuous running commentary that the episode does not endorse.

One Director, One Writer

Eight episodes, one director, one writer, shot as a single production, which was unusual in 2014 and is the reason for the tonal consistency.

Television normally distributes episodes across directors and rooms of writers, which produces variation and a house style that can absorb it. This season has no variation, which means every decision compounds.

That approach is also why the season’s weaknesses are consistent. The female characters are thin throughout, the dialogue tips over at regular intervals, and both are the same person’s limitations applied uniformly. A writers’ room would have caught some of it and would also have flattened the parts that are extraordinary.

Michelle Monaghan gets the worst of it. Maggie is written entirely in relation to two men, is given one position she states repeatedly, and she is a capable performer with almost nothing available to her across the whole of the eight hours.

The subsequent seasons changed the arrangement and none has matched it. Whether that is the format, the writer, the director or the cast is genuinely arguable, and the first season remains a single controlled object in a way almost no television is.

The anthology format was also the point. Eight hours, one story, a conclusion, and a cast who were never going to return, which removed every incentive toward the self-preservation that stops most ongoing series from ever resolving anything at all.

Should you watch True Detective S1E1?

Yes, and watch all eight. An hour built on two men lying in separate rooms about a case from seventeen years earlier, with a landscape somebody has used up, a worldview delivered in a car by somebody nobody wants to hear it from, and a body arranged in a field wearing antlers.

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