True Detective review: ‘Bad, bad men are still doing bad, bad things’

Four new characters go about their dodgy business in a doomy atmosphere – but what of the case, you may well wonder?


Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell investigate in True Detective. Photograph: Lacey Terrell/HBO

“I welcome judgment” says Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell somewhere underneath a droopy moustache). “I’m an American – say it,” orders Detective Antigone “Ani” Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) to a line-up of webcam girls she’s hoping are illegal immigrants. “I had to work out some kinks …” offers California highway officer Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) (yes, he’s in CHiPs!), to his bored, semi-clad girlfriend after a 30-minute shower, the effects of his blue pill having finally kicked in. “Never do anything out of hunger – not even eating,” says casino owner Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), confusing everyone.

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(Sky Atlantic), round two. Unlike, say, Line of Duty, which adopted the “guest lead” model – swapping Lennie James for Keeley Hawes but keeping the core team of Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston, or American Horror Story, which has employed a floating repertory system with Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett recast as different characters in different scenarios each season (an asylum, a coven, a travelling freak show), the “anthology” model True Detective is using feels closer to The Twilight Zone or Tales Of The Unexpected model. Apparently it’s a brand name guaranteeing a doomy atmosphere, confusing crimes, scenes of bad, bad men (and now – a woman!) doing bad, bad things … and then going out to do some police work. So far, True Detective 2 seems to be exploring (did anything really get solved last time?) the case of Ben Caspere – a city manager who has gone missing, just as he was about to wrap up a big land deal.

From Leonard Cohen’s granite voice on the stylish opening credits (“I live among you well disguised”) to the cameras gliding with all the threat of a drone above LA’s freeways, it’s clear that it’s also a show that wants to be taken very seriously. After pairing Matthew McConaughey with Woody Harrelson last time round, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto has doubled down with four stars, swapping Louisiana’s swamps for the more familiar LA streets. There’s even a freeway sign for “Mulholland Drive” at one point, but this feels closer to the over-boiled noir of Frank Miller’s Sin City than any of David Lynch’s intense surrealism (even with a dead crow being driven around).

This is an LA where it is always night inside bars, where breakfast is a bump of coke with a side order of other “bad cop” stock tropes and where ransacked apartments are littered with sex toys, lurid paintings and a skeleton wearing a Virgin Mary-blue headscarf and a crown.

Vince Vaughn’s easy onscreen charm, perfected after years of douche-bro dudecoms, is replaced by a burnt-out nervous energy (perhaps he has finally seen The Internship), as Frank worries that he should have “sprung for the country club” instead of schmoozing potential investors in his own casino lounge.

Meanwhile, Velcoro gets the only flashback of this episode as we learn how he came to be on Semyon’s payroll. Back in his pre-moustache days he was seduced to the seedy side after Frank offered up the name of the scumbag who raped Velcoro’s wife (and probably fathered his son).

In the present, it’s fair to say Velcoro’s parenting skills leave a lot to be desired. Now divorced, he shows up drunk outside his son’s school, bullies the name of his son’s bully out of him (“Aspen? Is that a boy’s name?”), tracks down the address, then pounds the bully’s dad into the ground with a knuckleduster in front of him: let that be a lesson to you, “Ass-pen”, he growls.

If there’s anyone with any chance of enjoying a McConaughaissance here it’s probably McAdams – an actor whose characters are more usually associated with the death of the romcom than murders involving people with eyes burned out by acid. Here, her Ani is a convincing mess. We meet her getting dressed after what looks like an uncomfortable one-night stand with another cop who is having a Meat Loaf moment (he’d do anything for love, but he won’t do that, thanks very much).

Two of the leads she investigates double as backstory pitstops: she finds her sister working as a webcam girl and later investigates a missing person in a hippy new age centre, where the long-haired guru preaching a lesson in accepting the nothingness of the universe turns out to be her dad.

And what of the case, you may well wonder? Out on his bike in the middle of the night, uneasy rider Woodrugh spins off the road and accidentally finds Caspere sitting on a bench, staring out at the ocean. Apparently he’s been restaging his very own Weekend At Bernie’s: he’s a corpse wearing shades who we have been watching as he is driven around by a mysterious chauffeur (also the owner of the stuffed crow). Velcoro and Bezzerides are called to the scene in a handy bit of cross-jurisdiction teamwork, and faster than you can summon up the energy to wonder where all the time has gone (where’s a flat circle when you need one?), it starts to feel like these true detectives might just be going somewhere.