True Detective

"Michael Graziadei - Dan O'Brien"

"Josh Hopkins - Jim Dobkins"

"Jon Tenney - Alan Jones"

"Sarah Gadon - Elisa Montgomery"

"Steven Williams - Junius"

"Rhys Wakefield - Freddy Burns"

"To state the obvious: while the male detectives of “True Detective” are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters—none with any interior life. Instead of an ensemble, “True Detective” has just two characters, the family-man adulterer Marty, who seems like a real and flawed person (and a reasonably interesting asshole, in Harrelson’s strong performance), and Rust, who is a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. A sinewy weirdo with a tragic past, Rust delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti. At first, this buddy pairing seems like a funky dialectic: when Rust rants, Marty rolls his eyes. But, six episodes in, I’ve come to suspect that the show is dead serious about this dude. Rust is a heretic with a heart of gold. He’s our fetish object—the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms."

"It was about the evil of men who treat women as lurid props, but the show treated women as lurid props."

"Like almost all the supporting characters on this show, the women were just sketches—occasionally naked ones—compared to our full-bodied detectives. The show’s major crimes involved endemic brutality against women and children, and victims is all that the women of this show remained, people against whom various wrongs were committed. No TV show has an obligation to be everything to everyone. True Detective is a series I admired and enjoyed, and its treatment of women is not even the thing that irked me most about the finale, which left a number of niggling questions unanswered and finished on a "let there be light" riff. But it’s worth lingering on True Detective’s woman problem in part because that problem is closely, if not intentionally, tied to the show’s massive success: When it comes to prestige TV, there has yet to be a downside to out-bro-ing yourself."

"Matthew McConaughey - Detective Rustin "Rust" Cohle"

"Woody Harrelson - Detective Martin "Marty" Hart"

"Michelle Monaghan - Maggie Hart"

"Michael Potts - Detective Maynard Gilbough"

"Tory Kittles - Detective Thomas Papania"

"Kevin Dunn - Major Ken Quesada"

"Alexandra Daddario - Lisa Tragnetti"

"Charles Halford - Reginald "Reggie" Ledoux"

"Jay O. Sanders - Billy Lee Tuttle"

"Glenn Fleshler - Errol William Childress"

"Elizabeth Reaser - Laurie Perkins"

"Lili Simmons - Beth"

"Colin Farrell - Detective Ray Velcoro"

"Vince Vaughn - Frank Semyon"

"Rachel McAdams - Detective Antigone "Ani" Bezzarides"

"Taylor Kitsch - Officer Paul Woodrugh"

"Kelly Reilly - Jordan Semyon"

"Ritchie Coster - Mayor Austin Chassani"

"Lolita Davidovich - Nancy Spencer"

"James Frain - Lieutenant Kevin Burris"

"Timothy Spencer - Osip Agronov"

"W. Earl Brown - Detective Teague Dixon"

"Afemo Omilani - Police Chief Holloway"

"Christopher James Baker - Blake Churchman"

"David Morse - Eliot Bezzarides"

"Michael Hyatt - Katherine Davis"

"Mahershala Ali - Detective Wayne Hays"

"Carmen Ejogo - Amelia Reardon"

"Stephen Dorff - Detective Roland West"

"Scoot McNairy - Tom Purcell"

"Mamie Gummer - Lucy Purcell"

"Ray Fisher - Henry Hays"

"Michael Greyeyes - Brett Woodard"

"Scott Shepherd - Harris James"

"Look, the story is what the story is," says Fukunaga when I ask him about the criticism. "It's about two men who work in a very macho industry, in terms of the area they're working in and the crimes they're dealing with. But it's about two men's dysfunction as much as anything. The show is not going to pass the Bechdel test. I considerably doubt that. So is it sexist? I don't know. I always focus more on the main characters and what they're doing, and I didn't write it, so… My job is to make the best ver-sion of that story possible."

"What I love about Cohle is everything he says is true. Like it or not. He can’t suffer fools, and to get through everyday life, you have to suffer fools. Cohle can’t do that. No illusions. Absolutely not."

"One of the great things about this is that the identities of the men, at these times, was very clear. I didn’t have to do a lot of creative wandering in my head. One of my favorite things that I got to do with Cohle was go, “Who is he in ‘95?” Here’s a guy who is coming back on to a case, just barely hanging onto the rails. He needs a case to keep his shit together, literally. In 2012, he’s off the rails. He’s cashed in. He’s fallen prey to his own beliefs. Every day that he’s alive is another day of penance, in this indentured servitude he calls life."

"If you share my weakness for shows that shuffle time or have tense interrogations—like the late, great “Homicide” or the better seasons of “Damages”—you might be interested to see these methods com-bined. The modern interviews become a voice-over, which is layered over flashbacks, and the contrast between words and images reveals that our narrators have been cherry-picking details and, at crucial junctures, flat-out lying. So far, so complex. On the other hand, you might take a close look at the show’s opening credits, which suggest a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses. The more episodes that go by, the more I’m starting to suspect that those asses tell the real story. This aspect of “True Detective” (which is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga) will be gratingly familiar to anyone who has ever watched a new cable drama get acclaimed as “a dark masterpiece”: the slack-jawed teen prostitutes; the strippers gyrating in the background of police work; the flashes of nudity from the designated put-upon wifey character; and much more nudity from the occasional cameo hussy, like Marty’s mistress, whose rack bounces merrily through Episode 2. Don’t get me wrong: I love a nice bouncy rack. And if a show has something smart to say about sex, bring it on."

"One of the images I first saw in my head when I read the screenplay was a plain landscape towards dusk," says Fukunaga over the phone from his home in New York. "There was a still, Magritte-like light hanging in the sky and these two cold, hard characters at the front, staring at a burned-out church. I loved the starkness of that, the openness of everything being exposed to the air. There's a lot of two-hander dialogue in True Detective, and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn't necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling."