Warning: The following post is rated M/A. It contains Adult Content, Adult Language and Violence.
Today is the first day of Spring. And in the ordinary course of events, to herald its welcome arrival, I would have written about sunshine yellow daffodils and pink-nosed baby bunny rabbits.
Now I just want to blow their fu***ing heads off.
I am in the thrall of True Detective.
Over two days last week, I binged-watched all the episodes on HBO Go.
OMG.
Have you seen this series yet? It’s reason enough to get HBO Go- if you don’t have it already. That way you can watch it whenever the demon is upon you.
TD takes everything we’ve come to love about police procedural/crime dramas and turns these expectations back upon our naive selves. It takes the “buddy cop” movie genre and eviscerates it with serial killer glee.
Imagine-if you can- a world in which Woody Harrelson plays the sane(r) one of the cop partners.
Hard to picture, right? Well, let me just point out that Matthew McConaughey plays the other one.
Nuff said.
And they are fu***ing awesome. They are unbelievable in their roles as police detectives Marty Hart and Rust Cohle.
As is every single other actor brilliantly cast in this series about two burned-out, strung out, disillusioned cops in Louisiana on the trail of a twisted, dicked-up psycho murderer. (The only really good kind.)
Real Life True Crime Sidebar: Last Sunday my neighborhood- and practically all of the north side of Chicago- was brought to a standstill by a manhunt for a murderer. Nothing glamorous. From what I can glean from the news accounts, he was a longtime wife-beater from Georgia with numerous incidents of domestic abuse in his file. Finally he went too far.
The cops had traced him to relatives in Harvey, Illinois and from there the chase was on. The fleeing fugitive crashed his car at Fullerton on Lake Shore Drive, and then brother, it was really a free-for-all.
The Chicago police closed down the drive, they closed down the Lincoln Park Zoo, helicopters hovered and searched non-stop, and traffic went to hell for the rest of the day into the evening.
This played havoc with Nick coming over here for dinner and my Chinese food delivery.
(Luckily both the delivery guy and my son were intrepid and determined to get through the police cordons. They arrived within fifteen minutes of each other.)
They finally collared the guy sometime around 9:30 that night with only one policeman getting injured in fray. Hats off to everyone.
But it was a mess while it lasted
This is the dreary, run-of-the mill kind of murderer.
There’s none of that in True Detective.
Don’t worry. My hand to God there will NOT be any spoilers in this post. The topsy-turvy plot-twist thrill ride is a major part of this smart series’ allure. I wouldn’t wreck a second of it for you.
But I can say that if you take a swampy bayou, a creepy old-time religious sect, some prostitutes, a motorcycle gang and add incest, hurricanes, strippers, a cheated-on wife (Michelle Monaghan. Unbelievably great. And does she ever strike a blow for all cheated-on wives everywhere. Right on, sister.) booze, coke, crooked politicians, meth and antlers, you can’t miss. You’ve got riveting television.
Btw, True Detective is the best thing to be on tv since The Sopranos. In fact, I’d go as far to say that in some ways, TD makes Tony and his family seem like The Waltons. (The John-boy Waltons- not Sam’s Crystal Bridge clan.)
There’s homage to Hitchcock and spooky, mood-setting music by T-Bone Burnett, too.
And all the while there’s Rust spouting philosophy about “time being a flat circle,” or “how we all want confession” or “in this universe time is linear but outside of this universe, all perspective, all time wouldn’t exist. Our space/time continuum is flattened… everything outside our dimension is eternity looking down on us…”
Or here’s Marty: “Infidelity is one kind of sin but my true failure was inattention.”
WTF? What kind of cop talks like this? I didn’t understand half of it but it all served to keep me off-balance and riveted.
And, as a writer, I was completely blown away. Let me state here and now that the creator and sole writer of the series- Nic Pizzolatto- is a stone cold genius.
Born in New Orleans (where else?) he taught fiction and literature at Chapel Hill, University of Chicago and DePauw before he quit academia to write full-time.
Pizolatto’s wild narrative of Marty and Rust ended with last Sunday’s finale. This was very cagey, I think.
It freed him up to let the story line flow. From the get go, the creator didn’t have to worry about the fates of Marty and Rust. They weren’t going to have to carry the show no matter what. And the audience also knew that they weren’t going to be back next season to win the ratings game.
That meant that anything could happen to these guys. And it did.
And with the show’s overwhelming critical success and breath-taking popularity (so many people tuned in to watch the final episode that they crashed the HBO Go site) actors are bombarding HBO with their resumes and head shots.
The manhunt for the two new detectives to take Woody and Matthew’s places is on. And Brad Pitt is currently rumored to be interested in playing one of the next set.
That would be smokin’ hot.
Well, see you Sunday, and if this post wasn’t raunchy, salacious, violent, dirty or clever enough for you- you are sure to go crazy for True Detective.
Au revoir, chers.
Laissez les bons temps roulez.
