True Detective

Television is not exactly foreign soil for the crime procedural. The default "successful show" is often some form of procedural, usually legal, medical, or most commonly, police. That's why there are so many CSIs and Law and Orders that, as far as I can tell, are not really related to each other story-wise.

So what makes True Detective different?

Well, the most immediately recognizable distinction is that it stars two of Hollywood's A-List, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey - the latter of whom just won the Oscar for Best Actor.

As we've all been told, television is in a golden age, and it's drawing big names.

There are other ways that True Detective distinguishes itself. It's highly serialized, rather than a case-of-the-week, and each season will be a standalone story, presumably with a different cast. Indeed, True Detective's first season is really more like a miniseries. The show also focuses far more on its two leads than the case they are working, and tells a story that is grand and novelistic in scope.

And then there's the fact that it's a cosmic horror story.

Those who know a little about the bleak genre of horror whose most famous author is HP Lovecraft may have heard of the book called "The King in Yellow." Written by Robert W. Chambers in 1895, the book is a series of short stories revolving around the eponymous play, which, when read, drives the reader insane.

True Detective never becomes explicit with its supernatural allusions. The few times we see something utterly abnormal, it is generally suggested that it is some form of synesthesia or an acid flashback going on in Rust's (McConaughey) brain.

But the show connects the central idea of cosmic horror - that the more we know of our universe and its true nature, the farther we will slip into madness - with the experience of confronting the darkness within humanity.

Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart (Harrelson) are homicide detectives with the Louisiana State Police. In 1995, they get a case involving a young woman who was ritualistically murdered and put on display next to a tree in the middle of some farmland. For the next seventeen years, they pursue that case.

Marty is theoretically the stable, normal one of the pair. He's a good cop, and he's convinced that he's a good father and husband, even though he cheats on his wife and doesn't really pay much attention to his daughters. But Rust is a total nihilist. He's suffered a personal tragedy, which has left him with nothing to do but bury himself in his work, which just so happens to be staring into the face of the darkest stuff humanity has to offer.

When the series begins, we see things in two different eras. Marty and Rust are interviewed in 2012, and as they discuss their investigation, we see what goes down in 1995, and then later 2002, before we catch up to the present (well, two years ago, but close enough.)

Marty seems a little stiffer, but Rust has clearly gone down deep into that darkness. The framing device recalls that most famous of cosmic horror stories, the Call of Cthulhu. The two fresher, younger detectives, are looking at the mess of a human being that Rust has become, complete with long hair and a droopy mustache, and they're beginning to wonder if Rust got so close to the case that he took a little of the darkness with him. Is knowledge of that darkness like a disease, spreading to anyone who looks too closely?

The series does wrap up the mystery, but the exact nature of what happened remains ambiguous. This could be a case of mad people doing awful things, or it's possible that there is truly something far larger, far greater at work.

Really, I think that the underpinnings of just what genre True Detective is will remain ambiguous - certainly until season two, but likely throughout.