True Detective
At once the year’s most oppressive show, and its most memetic (#TrueDetctiveSeason2, “X” is a flat circle), True Detective’s whirlwind success was born from the kind of ruthless planning you expect from murder fiction writers, and their fictional murderers. It had the right airdate, heating up the lifeless and barren TVscape of early 2014 with a sweaty Southern Gothic; it had the right stars in Woody Harrelson in Matthew McConaughey, the latter of whom pulled off the seemingly impossible task of supplanting Bryan Cranston as TV acting’s odds-on awards favorite; and it had the right writer-director combo at the helm, with Nic Pizzolatto’s existential obsessions finding the only director that could capture them in Cary Fukunaga.
With Rust Cohle and Marty Hart as our guide, True Detective formed an eight-hour trek into the underbelly of the Louisiana bayou, leading the detectives deeper into the heart of darkness than most crime dramas would ever dare. Taking the bones of a police procedural and marinating it with hints of eldritch horror, Fukunaga was able to construct a world as seen through the eyes of Cohle, where reality and twisted fantasy could co-exist. Some of 2014’s most indelible sequences were already clear only two months into the year thanks to True Detective, whether it was a bravura 8-minute tracking shot through a firefight, or a slow pan onto McConaughey’s face as, he drained beer cans and waxed philosophical.
The narrow focus of the show meant the rest of the world of True Detective wasn’t nearly as complex as its two leads, and the most shocking thing about the resolution to the case was just how neat and tidy it all seemed. The show owed nothing to the obsessive Internet theories and predictions it inspired, but so much of True Detective’s power came from being the TV experience of the moment. For two solid months it was pretty much the only show anyone wanted to talk about. True Detective was a paperback thriller that millions of people were all reading every Sunday, but one that teased out its mystery so deftly that its breadcrumb trail of clues lured each viewer onto a different page by the end of each week, uniting them only in their desperate desire to see what happens next.
That’s our list of The 10 Best TV Shows of 2014 (so far), but what were your favourites from the last six months? Leave your picks in the comments below.