The much-talked-about serial killer drama True Detective finally aired in the UK on Saturday on Sky Atlantic. And the first few frames of the opening episode The Long Bright Dark showed that from here on in, nothing was going to be made simple: night, blackness, a flame being carried and a swelling rush of sound then the opening title. There, get stuck into that.
It was followed by a video interview of a police statement from Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart in 2012. Hart thought the detectives interviewing him might be interested in the murder of prostitute Dora Lang, but they seemed more concerned with his former detective partner Rustin Cohle - 'kind of a strange guy, huh?' We heard about him before we saw him.
Then we saw the statement of Rust Cohle himself (Matthew McConaughey, looking like a throwback to a hippy Vietnam vet). Clearly no longer a detective, Cohle started in on 'the occult, ritual murder' of Lang - 'January 3rd 1995, my daughter's birthday... I remember'.
The claustrophobic framing of the interview rooms gave way to a luscious wide frame of rural Louisiana in 1995, with Hart and Cohle on their way to the murder scene. They found the dead woman naked, bound, crowned with antlers and positioned kneeling before a tree, with a spiral symbol on her back. If you don't like serial-killer dramas - and I don't - or police procedurals - and I don't - then ordinarily this might have been the point you'd have checked out, but in those first five minutes there had already been enough writerly depth (all 10 episodes were written by novelist Nic Pizzolatto), cinematic flair (the series has been directed by Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre director Cary Fukunaga) and acting brilliance from McConaughey and Harrelson to justify staying with it. At the scene, Cohle sketched the murder victim carefully, lovingly adding artistic shading to the shape of her buttocks. Strange guy, huh?
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Already we knew we were on the trail not only of the murderer of Dora Lang but the enigma of Rust Cohle, a character whose extreme world view - 'I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution' - makes him more like a character from a 19th-century Russian novel than a TV crime drama.
By the end of the episode, it was blindingly clear, too, why the interviewing cops are so interested in him. There had been another murder. Cohle had anticipated their question: 'How could it be him if we already caught him in '95? How indeed, Detective?' I'm sticking around to find out. Despite its crime genre origins, True Detective appears to be the most ambitious TV drama for a long time.
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