Meanwhile, Marty’s wife, Maggie-played by Michelle Monaghan, she is the only prominent female character on the show-is an utter nothing-burger, all fuming prettiness with zero insides. “True Detective” has some tangy dialogue (“You are the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch”) and it can whip up an ominous atmosphere, rippling with hints of psychedelia, but these strengths finally dissipate, because it’s so solipsistically focussed on the phony duet. And everyone around these cops, male or female, is a dark-drama cliché, from the coked-up dealers and the sinister preachers to that curvy corpse in her antlers. McConaughey gives an exciting performance (in Grantland, Andy Greenwald aptly called him “a rubber band wrapped tight around a razor blade”), but his rap is premium baloney. He’s our fetish object-the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms. But, six episodes in, I’ve come to suspect that the show is dead serious about this dude. At first, this buddy pairing seems like a funky dialectic: when Rust rants, Marty rolls his eyes. A sinewy weirdo with a tragic past, Rust delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti. Instead of an ensemble, “True Detective” has just two characters, the family-man adulterer Marty, who seems like a real and flawed person (and a reasonably interesting asshole, in Harrelson’s strong performance), and Rust, who is a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. Wives and sluts and daughters-none with any interior life. To state the obvious: while the male detectives of “True Detective” are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is paper-thin. The series, for all its good looks and its movie-star charisma, isn’t just using dorm-room deep talk as a come-on: it has fallen for its own sales pitch. And, frankly, “True Detective” reeks of the stuff.
But, after years of watching “Boardwalk Empire,” “Ray Donovan,” “House of Lies,” and so on, I’ve turned prickly, and tired of trying to be, in the novelist Gillian Flynn’s useful phrase, the Cool Girl: a good sport when something smells like macho nonsense. And if a show has something smart to say about sex, bring it on. Don’t get me wrong: I love a nice bouncy rack. This aspect of “True Detective” (which is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga) will be gratingly familiar to anyone who has ever watched a new cable drama get acclaimed as “a dark masterpiece”: the slack-jawed teen prostitutes the strippers gyrating in the background of police work the flashes of nudity from the designated put-upon wifey character and much more nudity from the occasional cameo hussy, like Marty’s mistress, whose rack bounces merrily through Episode 2. The more episodes that go by, the more I’m starting to suspect that those asses tell the real story. On the other hand, you might take a close look at the show’s opening credits, which suggest a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses. The modern interviews become a voice-over, which is layered over flashbacks, and the contrast between words and images reveals that our narrators have been cherry-picking details and, at crucial junctures, flat-out lying. If you share my weakness for shows that shuffle time or have tense interrogations-like the late, great “Homicide” or the better seasons of “Damages”-you might be interested to see these methods combined. In the contemporary time line, these ex-partners are questioned by two other cops, who suspect that the murders have begun again. In the nineteen-nineties, two detectives, Marty Hart and Rust Cohle (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey), hunt down a fetishistic murderer, the sort of artsy bastard who tattoos his female victims, then accessorizes them with antlers and scatters cultish tchotchkes at the crime scene. Like many critics, I was initially charmed by the show’s anthology structure (eight episodes and out next season a fresh story) and its witty chronology, which chops and dices a serial-killer investigation, using two time lines. (“Treme” and “True Blood” are also set there.) Every week, it offers up shiver-inducing cable intoxicants, from an over-the-top action sequence so liquid it rivals a Scorsese flick to piquant scenes of rural degradation, filmed on location in Louisiana, a setting that has become a bit of an HBO specialty.
Judged purely on style, HBO’s “True Detective” is a great show. Though the show has movie-star charisma, it reeks of macho nonsense.
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