More times than not, however, it defers to an earnest, rote view of bad religion, only marginally enlivened by the appearance of Shea Whigham as a big-tent preacher. At its wildest moments (Hart’s testosterone-fueled tizzy over his mistress, Rust’s Quaalude deals and almost-tender relationship with Michelle Monaghan’s Maggie Hart), the series feels as frighteningly nervy and furious in its delivery and intent as prime David Lynch.

The problem is that True Detective seems a little too comfortable within the confines of its genre, always tickling a kind of hard-boiled hysteria, but never diving headfirst into a full-tilt, radical madness. As grim as the narrative gets, there’s a distinguishable, galvanic sense that the rigidity of the show’s archetypes are being undermined and loosened up by its creators and cast. The interactions between Rust and Martin, which is to say between the godless and the faithful, are often brazenly on the nose, but the cast perfectly summons a distinct, macabre theatricality in tone. Fukanaga and Pizzolatto, however, smartly embrace the pulpiness of their material. In this sense, True Detective begins as television’s answer to Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners: a gorgeously moody but inarguably trashy genre work-out. The show’s creator-writer, Nic Pizzolatto, worked on AMC’s The Killing, which is evident in the tired glumness of True Detective’s story, but Fukanaga finds a kind of picked-at beauty in the Southern sprawl, as if he were looking over the dried-up remains of an exquisite corpse.

As directed by Cary Fukunaga, who recently gave Jane Eyre a ghostly kick, True Detective’s setting is utilized less for its regional flavor than as the ideal location for an earthly perdition. The 1995 subplot serves as the more familiar detective yarn, detailing the discovery of the horn-crowned corpse through the investigation into a religious leader known as the Yellow King. You’ve probably heard this one before, but HBO’s latest puts issues of identity and the rigors of artifice in front of the mystery at the heart of the story.

Hart’s a God-fearing man who screws around and talks about his family, while Rust is busy trying to shake off years of drug abuse which has pickled him to the point of atheistic bleakness. Cut between the mid ‘90s and present-day Louisiana, the series centers around two detectives, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson), who, in 1995, investigated and solved the occult-like slaying of Dora Lange, a young prostitute, only to be faced with a similar case 17 years later. It’s hard to take True Detective seriously at first, as few shows have demonstrated such a pointed, occasionally overbearing fuck-the-world attitude right off the bat.

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