True Detective season 1


The first season of True Detective, an American anthology crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolatto, aired in eight episodes between January 12 and March 9, 2014 on the premium cable network HBO. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson lead a five-actor principal cast as Louisiana State Police homicide detectives Rustin "Rust" Cohle and Martin "Marty" Hart. Each True Detective season follows a self-contained story, characterized by distinct sets of characters, settings, and events with shared continuity.
Framed as a nonlinear narrative, True Detective season one explores Cohle and Hart's recollection of their investigation of the murder of Dora Lange from 1995 to 2002. They must revisit the investigation ten years later, as new evidence implicates the perpetrator in a slew of other unsolved murders and disappearances. Subplots in the season center on the men's personal lives.
Pizzolatto initially conceived True Detective as a novel, but pursued a television concept because of the story's shifts in time and perspective. Cary Joji Fukunaga directed the episodes, each funded with a $4–4.5 million budget and tax subsidies from the Louisiana state government. Filming for the season began in January 2013 and finished that June. True Detective season one has been read as work that examines philosophical pessimism, Christianity, and masculinity. Further discourse addresses the story's comic and horror fiction influences, the show's artistic merits under the framework of auteur theory, and its depiction of women.
True Detective season one received highly positive reviews in the media. Critics praised the show as one of the strongest dramas of the year, but occasionally criticized some aspects of the writing such as characterization. It was a candidate for numerous awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film, and won several other honors for writing, cinematography, direction, and acting.

Episodes

Cast

Main cast

  • Matthew McConaughey as Detective Rustin "Rust" Cohle, a troubled, nihilistic state police detective and Hart's partner
  • Woody Harrelson as Detective Martin "Marty" Hart, a state police detective and Cohle's partner
  • Michelle Monaghan as Maggie Hart, Hart's wife, later divorced
  • Michael Potts as Detective Maynard Gilbough, a state police detective interviewing Hart and Cohle seventeen years after the murder of Dora Lange
  • Tory Kittles as Detective Thomas Papania, a state police detective interviewing Hart and Cohle seventeen years after the murder of Dora Lange

    Recurring and guest

  • Kevin Dunn as Major Ken Quesada, Hart and Cohle's superior in 1995
  • Madison Wolfe as young Audrey Hart, Hart's daughter
  • * Erin Moriarty as teenage Audrey Hart
  • Meghan Wolfe as young Macie Hart, Hart's daughter
  • * Brighton Sharbino as teenage Macie Hart
  • Alexandra Daddario as Lisa Tragnetti, a court stenographer with whom Hart has an affair
  • Michael Harney as Steve Geraci, Hart and Cohle's colleague, later the sheriff of Louisiana's Iberia parish
  • J. D. Evermore as Detective Bobby Lutz, Hart and Cohle's colleague
  • Don Yesso as Commander Speece, Hart and Cohle's superior
  • Brad Carter as Charlie Lange, Dora Lange's convict ex-husband
  • Jay O. Sanders as Billy Lee Tuttle, an influential reverend
  • Lili Simmons as Beth, a young prostitute who knew Dora Lange
  • Shea Whigham as Joel Theriot, a traveling minister
  • Glenn Fleshler as Errol Childress, a groundskeeper at one of Tuttle's academies
  • Charles Halford as Reggie Ledoux, a drug producer
  • Joseph Sikora as Ginger, a member of the Iron Crusaders biker gang who has ties to Cohle
  • Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as DeWall LeDoux, Reggie's cousin and cook partner
  • Elizabeth Reaser as Laurie Perkins, a woman Cohle becomes involved with
  • Paul Ben-Victor as Major Leroy Salter, Hart and Cohle's superior in 2002
  • Ann Dowd as Betty Childress, Errol's half-sister

    Production

Conception

Before creating True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, DePauw University, and the University of Chicago. His first commercial writing venture was a short story collection he published as Between Here and the Yellow Sea in 2006, inspired by HBO's series The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood. After following up with a novel, Galveston, in 2010, he began concentrating on television writing. His earlier attempts at scriptwriting were unsuccessful because of a lack of money. Pizzolatto obtained his first major TV gig as a screenwriter for AMC's series The Killing in 2011. He credits the show with giving him a glimpse of the inner workings of the television industry. Pizzolatto grew increasingly dissatisfied with the series' creative direction, and left two weeks into staff writing sessions for its second season.
True Detective was intended to be a novel, but once the project took definite form, Pizzolatto thought the narrative's shifts in time and perspective made it more suitable for television. He pitched an adaptation of Galveston, and from May to July 2010 he developed six screenplays, including an early, 90-page draft of the True Detective pilot script. Pizzolatto secured a development deal with HBO for a potential pilot series shortly thereafter. He wrote a second True Detective script soon after his departure from The Killing thanks to the support of production company and manager Anonymous Content, which ultimately produced and developed the project in-house. By April 2012, following a heated bidding period, HBO commissioned eight episodes of True Detective, with a budget of $4–4.5 million per episode. Pizzolatto did not hire a writing staff because he believed a collaborative approach would not work with his isolated, novelistic process, and that a group would not achieve his desired result. After working alone for about three months, the final copy of the project script was 500 pages long.

Cast and crew

As an anthology, each True Detective season follows a self-contained narrative, characterized by distinct sets of characters, settings, and events with shared continuity. Pizzolatto began contemplating the lead roles while he was pitching the series to networks in early 2012. True Detective anthology format required actors to commit to only a single season, so Pizzolatto was able to attract film stars who normally avoid television series because of their busy schedules. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey were among the actors Pizzolatto considered for star billing. McConaughey, who had recently finished filming Killer Joe, was contracted well before HBO commissioned the season. Impressed with his performance in The Lincoln Lawyer, Pizzolatto at first assigned him to play Hart, but McConaughey convinced him to give him the part of Cohle. When asked in a Variety interview about his decision to switch parts, the actor replied, "I wanted to get in that dude's head. The obsession, the island of a man—I'm always looking for a guy who monologues. It's something really important as I feel I'm going into my better work." To prepare for the role, McConaughey created a 450-page analysis—the "Four Stages of Rustin Cohle"—to study his character's evolution during the season.
Harrelson was the season's next significant casting choice, brought on to play Hart at McConaughey's request. Harrelson stated that he joined True Detective partly because he wanted to work with certain people involved in the project, with whom he had previously collaborated in the 2012 HBO film Game Change. Michelle Monaghan agreed to play the season's female lead, Maggie, because she felt compelled by the direction of the plot and her character's story arc. Michael Potts and Tory Kittles completed the principal cast, playing detectives Maynard Gilbough and Thomas Papania, respectively. Major supporting roles in True Detective first season include Kevin Dunn as Major Ken Quesada, Alexandra Daddario as Lisa Tragnetti, and Brad Carter as Charlie Lange.
Pizzolatto narrowed his search for a suitable director to Cary Joji Fukunaga, whom he knew from Anonymous Content, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Fukunaga was formally appointed as director after Iñárritu pulled out of the project due to film commitments. In preparation for his work on the series, Fukunaga spent time with a homicide detective of the Louisiana State Police's Criminal Investigations Division to develop an accurate depiction of a 1990s homicide detective's work. Fukunaga recruited Adam Arkapaw, director of photography of Top of the Lake, as project cinematographer. Arkapaw came to the director's attention for his work in Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, and was hired after the two negotiated a deal at a meeting in San Francisco. Alex DiGerlando, whom Fukunaga had worked with on Benh Zeitlin Glory at Sea in 2008, was appointed as the production designer. Fukunaga said in an interview, "I knew what Alex accomplished in the swamps of Louisiana and given some money, how much more amazing he could be in building sets that would just be used for one or two days and be abandoned again."

Filming

HBO chose to film in Louisiana over Pizzolatto's original preference for Arkansas, as the state offered transferrable tax credits to subsidize the cost of production for all eligible shoots. Pizzolatto was also compelled by the industrial setting as a storytelling device: "There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all ... everything lives under layers of concealment. The woods are thick and dark and impenetrable. On the other hand you have the beauty of it all from a distance."
Principal photography took three months, from January to June 2013, with approximately five minutes of film shot per day. Production staff constructed various set pieces, among them a scorched chapel, Joel Theriot's tent revival, and the Louisiana State Criminal Investigations Division offices, the last of which they built inside an abandoned light bulb warehouse near Elmwood. For the Dora Lange crime scene, the crew filmed exterior shots at a remote sugarcane field which, because it was partially burned, inspired what DiGerlando called a "moody and atmospheric" backdrop for the corresponding interior scenes.
The scene in which Cohle, taking Ginger hostage, escapes a housing complex amidst gunfire, was captured in Bridge City as a single six-minute tracking shot, a technique Fukunaga had employed in Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre. Shot in seven takes, preparation for the scene was extensive and demanding: McConaughey trained with Mark Norby to master a fighting style for his character, and the nature of the shoot required a team of stunt coordinators, make-up artists, and special effects crew on hand during its entire course. Elsewhere, shooting took place at an unoccupied high school campus in Kenner and nineteenth-century Fort Macomb, located outside New Orleans. Former Louisiana State Police Detective Tim Hanks served as technical advisor for the season.
True Detective season one was shot on 35 mm film, which the production staff chose to achieve an authentic "nostalgic" quality. The season was filmed using a Panavision Millennium XL2 camera, and the choice of lens corresponded to the period when a scene took place. Scenes set in 1995 and 2002 were captured with Panavision PVintage lenses, which produced a softer image because they were made of recycled, low-contrast glass. As these scenes were written as a reflection of Cohle and Hart's memory, production sought to make them as cinematic as possible, to reflect what Arkapaw called "the fragmentation of their lucid imaginations back through their past." To achieve this, they relied on wider lenses to exaggerate composition. The 2012 scenes were shot with Panavision Primo lenses: the visual palette in comparison was sharper and had much more contrast, lending a "modern, crisp feeling" to the images, and, according to Arkapaw, pulling "characters out from their environments to hopefully help audiences get inside their heads".