Bring Back the True Detectives
Zack Sharf
Alright, alright, alright:
“True Detective” creator Nic Pizzolatto recently appeared on the “Nothing Left Unsaid” podcast and revealed he has an idea for a new story that would bring back the characters of Rust Cohle and Marty Harty, memorably played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in the first season of HBO’s anthology series. Many viewers (and McConaughey himself) still regard “True Detective” Season 1 as the show’s best. The 2014 season earned Emmy nominations for both actors.
There is no debate here. The most recent (fourth) season of True Detective – "Night Country" – was okay. It started strong but ended weak, IMO. The third season, with Mahershala Ali, was overall pretty good but up and down. The second season was a mess and borderline unwatchable. But the first season?
I mean, personally I think it was one of the best seasons of any show ever on television. And I've been saying this since it first aired. Even today, over a decade later, it lingers in your brain, haunting you. In many ways, it felt like the beginning of a new wave of "prestige TV" that led directly into the streaming revolution, with Hollywood talent now routinely doing series.
So yeah, they should run it back.
“I actually have another story for Cohle and Hart that — who knows? — maybe we’ll do it one day,” Pizzolatto said. “It’s character-based again. … But it’s not something I’ve written or anything. It’s just, I had that in my head. And we’ve talked about getting back together and doing it, and I think the guys are open to it. It’s just a question of whether that would ever happen or not.”
If I'm HBO – in the midst of the clusterfucky HBO/Max/HBO Max rebrand – I move heaven and Earth to bring back McConaughey and Harrelson. It may have been tiny compared to say, Game of Thrones – which they should also potentially revisit with the original cast to remake the last couple of seasons – it had and still has a cultural cachet that matters. This could bring back HBO, quite literally.