True Detective “The Long Bright Dark” 

Were you able to catch the series premiere of HBO’s True Detective? It was so good (see my thoughts below the break). If you missed it (or DVRed it and haven’t gotten around to it yet) watch it immediately. If you have HBO, you have another chance to catch this great episode on Wednesday, January 15th at 10 pm.

From HBO:

True Detective centers on two detectives, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), whose lives collide and entwine during a seventeen-year hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana. The investigation of a bizarre murder in 1995 is framed and interlaced with testimony from the detectives in 2012, when the case has been reopened. The series is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga.

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A clip from the premiere:

For those of you who have seen the episode, let’s talk.

Are we experiencing a bit of a Matthew McConaughey renaissance right now? I like it. He was great in The Dallas Buyers Club and he’s pretty phenomenal in this. He plays such a strange, off-putting, socially awkward man. He’s not “good at a party” or in real life, according to his partner Marty. But he’s got a mind for the type of case they’ve been assigned to, which is obviously unsettling to everyone around him. A lot of the things that come out of his mouth seem to alarm Marty and all of the other cops at the Louisiana CID. He’s got an interesting (read: strange) way of looking at life and of interacting with others. It makes him a great detective, but kind of a horrible human being. He’s an alcoholic whose marriage fell apart shortly after the death of his child. And although Marty seems like the much more stable one of the pair, he’s got problems of his own. He doesn’t seem to spend enough time with his family and from what we saw in “The Long Bright Dark,” he might be having an affair.

The case: A dead prostitute is found posed in a cane field. She’s naked, wearing a sort of crown fashioned from deer antlers and she’s surrounded by devil’s traps. This is 1995 in Louisiana and the community is deeply religious. Any mention of Satan is going to spook the locals. This isn’t the type of case they’re used to catching, so it’s beneficial – for now – to have someone like Rust on the case. He’s got an eye for it and he knows something like this has either happened in the past or when happen again.

The filter: It’s 2012. Rust and Marty are no longer partners. The case files were destroyed in a hurricane and the ex-partners are being questioned separately. The cops are working on a new case with a lot of similarities to their old case. But what’s even more interesting is that the cops are as interested in Rust’s personal life as they are in the details of their (presumed-until-now) closed case.

Interesting tidbits: Rust and Marty worked together for seven years and despite everything Marty thought Rust was a good cop. Marty is retired from the force. Rust has Thursdays off (but we don’t know what his job is) and starts drinking at Noon no matter what.

I can’t wait to see where this goes. I’m already incredibly invested in this partnership and seeing where these guys went wrong with their case. They put someone in jail for this crime and as of right now it looks like it was the wrong person. I’m also wondering about the cops working on the current case. Why do they want to know so much about Rust?

True Detective airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.