TRUE DETECTIVE: 'NYPost' Review

True Detective’ needs dramatic jolt

‘True Detective’ needs dramatic jolt
‘True Detective” is good, but not great — and therein lies the rub for HBO.

The cable network, looking for its Next Big Hit, has high hopes for the gritty series, and who can blame them? “True Detective” boasts A-list leads in Matthew McConaughey — an odds-on Oscar nominee for “Dallas Buyers Club” — and the equally talented Woody Harrelson, who’s reliably good in just about everything in which he appears.

Should be a slam-dunk, right?

But “True Detective,” while engrossing at times — and extremely atmospheric — moves at a snail’s pace in fleshing out its two protagonists, Louisiana State Police Dets. Rust Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Harrelson), assigned to work the horrific, satanically-tinged ritualistic murder of a young woman found naked in a sugar-cane field, her hands and feet bound and deer antlers tied to her head.

The series opens in 2012, with Cohle and Hart speaking separately to investigators about the case, and about their eventual falling out — for reasons that will no doubt be revealed further down the narrative road.

It then flashes back to 1995, when the woman’s body is discovered on Jan. 3 — Cohle’s daughter’s birthday, he notes — and the (much-younger-looking) detectives, who’ve been working together only three months, open their investigation.

Sunday’s series opener, “The Long Bright Dark,” bounces back and forth between the two time frames in fleshing out the men’s disparate personalities. And, as we quickly learn, this is no heartwarming bromance. There’s little love lost between Cohle and Hart, who can barely stand to be in each other’s company but do have a grudging respect for the other’s abilities.

Cohle is moody and taciturn, and when he does speak, is prone to philosophical ramblings more akin to ’70s-era psycho-babble than anything profound (“I lack the constitution for suicide” is one of his bromides). He’s also not well-liked by the other detectives, who call him “The Tax Man” because he carries around a big ledger in which he takes notes.

Hart, just a bit more gregarious, is married with two young daughters, and resents his partner’s unwillingness to share anything about his personal life. “Past a certain age, a man without a family can be a bad thing” he notes cryptically in a nod to his partner’s implacable facade.

There’s a reason Cohle is reticent to discuss his past, which you’ll learn more about in Sunday’s opener as the detectives very slowly start piecing together leads in the murder case.

But while Sunday’s opener ends on a narrative cliffhanger, that momentum doesn’t carry over into the Jan. 19 episode, “Seeing Things,” which also employs the back-and-forth time frame device as we learn even more about Cohle’s past and Hart’s proclivity for also hiding dark secrets.

Both McConaughey and Harrelson turn in first-rate performances — you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they disliked each other in real life, such is the animosity between them. But the writing is a bit overblown and the pacing static — at times downright glacial. I kept waiting for that edge-of-your-seat “ahh” moment, which never arrived.

That might eventually happen over the course of “True Detective,” which will comprise eight episodes in following TV’s newest trend of “limited-run” or “event” series (take your pick). Whether viewers will stick around, despite McConaughey and Harrelson’s best efforts, remains to be seen.

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