Is True Detective worth sticking with? The jury’s out

I’ve got this brilliant idea for a major new cop series. It’s called Chalk and Cheese and, though you won’t have guessed this from the title, it’s about these detective partners who couldn’t be more different. Why, they’re like two incredibly dissimilar things, one, maybe an edible, milk-based product, the other some manner of mineral that you use to write with. Chocolate and Graphite: that’s another possible title, then.

So, anyway, what I thought is that one of the characters would be a normal, sensible family-man type. And the other, by way of humorous and dramatic contrast, would be completely out there. He could be addicted to drugs and alcohol, borderline autistic, psychologically damaged, a chain-smoker, a grumpy, antisocial sod too — but redeemed by his extraordinary insights into the criminal mind. Almost, perhaps, because he’s so dangerously close to being a psycho himself.

Well, it definitely worked for Sherlock, didn’t it? And now it appears to be working, too, for the latest hot HBO series from the US — True Detective. Woody Harrelson plays the Martin Freeman boring character and Matthew McConaughey plays the Benedict Cumberbatch interesting one. He’s so interesting that he appears in two incarnations: clean-cut and youngish weird; and, almost unrecognisably, drink-ravaged and older weird. (I say ‘almost unrecognisably’, though you’ll definitely know who it is if you’ve seen Dallas Buyers Club because he looks like his character from that.)

You may deduce from my snarkiness that I’m about to be critical. But I’m not, actually. It just amuses me how so much successful TV detective drama is dependent on archetypes, and how desperately it strives to disguise its lack of originality by using various distracting ruses.

One ruse, employed supremely well here, is location and era.