Something’s a missin True Detective
True Detective (3discs) 2014, Cert: 18 ★★★ ★★ Ray Donovan (4 discs) 2013, Cert: 15 ★★★ ★★
The omens look good for True Detective. This HBO Southern gothic cop show is artily lit, cleverly edited, and built around a couple of knockout performances from Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. And yet, and yet. The whole thing feels deader than the carvedup corpses whose killer they’re tracking.
The show’s problems begin with its fractured time-scheme. The murders that Marty Hart (Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (McConaughey) investigate took place back in 1995, yet the story is being told in the present day.
The jumpy structure isn’t hard to follow, but it is difficult to sustain interest in a thriller whose terrors are forever being interrupted by static shots of guys reminiscing. Not that they’re just any old reminiscences.
True Detective’s writer, Nic Pizzolatto, is a former English literature professor – and boy does it show. His dialogue is strewn with portentous ruminations on life and death.
Whatever happened to drama showing rather than telling? Actually, there’s rather a lot of showing in True Detective. Both McConaughey and Harrelson remove their tops, partly to show us how in shape they are and, partly, in the later scenes, to show what ageing and stress can do to the fittest bod.
But how to explain all the female nudity? Few episodes go by without a close-up of a pretty girl in the buff. I’m no prude, but none of these girls – not even Marty’s wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) – is treated as anything but eye candy.
When the girls strip off in Showtime’s Ray Donovan, another intelligent, high-end US crime drama, this time about a PI-type who ‘cleans up’ the antics of Tinseltown’s trashier stars, it’s in keeping with the show’s tawdry feel.
But should a show about a pervy serial killer really be making you leer unselfconsciously?
True Detective comes on like it’s a cut above the pulp comics for which it’s named. In the end, I’m not sure it isn’t down there with the dirtiest exploitation trivia.