Both are now focusing on other things – aware, perhaps, that these eight episodes will prove impossible to top.Violence against children strikes most people as a uniquely terrible phenomenon, which may be why filmmakers are so fond of it. True Detective will return for a second series next year but, sadly, without McConaughey or Harrelson. It's a daring, dizzying, dazzling sequence that acts as pay-off for all those long, languorous scenes across a police interview table. Running around corners and hopping over steel-link fences in the dark, he dodges gunmen as smoke swirls, sirens blare and chopper blades thunder. A single shot lasting a hair-raising six minutes stays locked on Cohle as he tries to escape from an undercover job gone desperately wrong. They became his angels.' As fans of Chambers know, people exposed to the play are driven insane as they discover incomprehensible and depraved truths about the universe.īut it's the climax of episode four that takes True Detective to another level, making it more than just a brilliant and brooding drama. 'I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest,' says Cohle in episode two, reading aloud from the journal of Dora Lange, a murdered prostitute. The King In Yellow, a fictional play frequently mentioned in the weird short stories of Robert W Chambers, crops up repeatedly. Wrapped in supernatural elements, the narrative is scattered with references to something bigger than that which is on Earth.

The script comes courtesy of Nic Pizzolatto, whose pitch-black prose gives the show its chillingly dark underbelly. Harrelson's Marty Hart is much more straight-down-the-line: a heavy-drinking cop with a brow that remains furrowed whether he's scratching around for answers, shaking off the last of a hangover or enduring many a long car journey with Cohle, listening to his theory that the world is 'one ghetto – a giant gutter in outer space'. 'Everything we've ever done,' he adds blankly, 'or will do, we're gonna do over and over again.' Such nihilistic stuff could seem pretentious in the mouth of a lesser actor, but McConaughey's portrayal of a man broken by his search for the truth is spellbinding. The intensity in his eyes gives a steely edge to Cohle's mumbled soliloquies as we see the bedraggled, haunted-looking man he has become, opining that 'time is a flat circle' as he plays with the beer cans he has drunk dry while talking to the police. The show, which aired earlier this year on Sky Atlantic in the UK, where it has just been released on box set, not only garnered rave reviews but also contributed to McConaughey's career revival.

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