Quentin Tarantino and Nic Pizzolatto probably won’t be having a friendly sitdown anytime soon. In 2015, when Tarantino promoted The Hateful Eight, he told Variety that he couldn’t even make it through True Detective‘s absorbing pilot episode. While Tarantino deserves a lot of credit for turning the public on to the most obscure movies worth seeking out, he couldn’t be more wrong about True Detective‘s masterful first season.
Of course, it’s hard to take the criticism too seriously when Tarantino didn’t even finish watching the first episode, much less the entire season that reunited old pals Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in a riveting occult murder mystery for the ages. With superb cinematic direction by Cary Joji Fukunaga, True Detective will rightly go down as one of HBO’s best crime shows, despite what Tarantino may think.
‘True Detective’ Season 1 is Arguably the Best TV Series of the Last 12 Years
With every episode written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, True Detective has a tight cinematic focus unlike most TV shows. Built around a nonlinear narrative that switches back and forth between interrogations in 1995 and 2012, the story concerns Louisiana detectives Martin Hart (Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (McConaughey) investigating a ritual satanic murder of a young woman that remains unsolved for nearly 20 years.
Fusing rich character development with a gripping murder mystery that only gets more bizarre, viewers learn about Rust’s drug-addled nihilism and Martin’s immoral infidelity as they take wildly different investigative approaches. Yet, despite True Detective Season 1 holding a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating and being ranked #49 on IMDb’s Top 250 TV shows, Quentin Tarantino was less than impressed.
While promoting The Hateful Eight in 2015, Tarantino told Variety that the last two TV shows he watched were Justified and How I Met Your Mother. Seemingly unsolicited, he added:
“I tried to watch the first episode of season one [of ‘True Detective’], and I didn’t get into it at all. I thought it was really boring.”
Really boring? While it’s known that Tarantino prefers exploitation B-movies and poorly-acted Spaghetti Westerns to artsy prestige pictures, it’s worth wondering how far into True Detective‘s pilot he got before he tuned out. Frankly, the dinner scene in which Rust pulls a psychological power play against Martin in front of Martin’s family was anything but boring. It set up a layered character dynamic between the two that only enriched over time.
And that doesn’t even account for how terrific the next episodes were, including a masterful 4:47 long take amid breathless action in Season 1, Episode 4, “Who Goes There.” Fukunaga won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Direction in a Drama Series for that episode. The series won five additional Emmys, including Outstanding Cinematography (for DP Adam Arkapaw) and Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series.
Perhaps if Tarantino were able to get through the pilot, he’d understand why True Detective lives up to the hype. However, Tarantino was absolutely spot on in his assessment of the wildly misguided Season 2 when he stated:
“And season two looks awful. Just the trailer — all these handsome actors trying to not be handsome and walking around looking like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. It’s so serious, and they’re so tortured, trying to look miserable with their mustaches and grungy clothes.”
No arguments there. Season 2 was indeed far too serious and convoluted for its own good and lacked the caliber of acting, directing, and chemistry between Harrelson and McConaughey. However, 12 years later, True Detective Season 1 holds up as arguably HBO’s best scripted drama of the last generation.
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