TV goes to the movies (and the movies come to TV).

The Prestige TV era saw a “talent tree” grow out of the dominant television voices of the 80s and 90s. Matthew Weiner came from The Sopranos’ writers’ room to create Mad Men. Vince Gilligan wrote for The X-Files before making Breaking Bad. Alec Berg went from the Seinfeld staff to creating Barry and executive producing Silicon Valley. Mike Schur went from a late-90s run on Saturday Night Live to a major creative role on The Office before launching Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place. In the early 2000s, TV players came from inside the system[1].

This held true across the board, even in acting. Even while the likes of Bryan Cranston, Jon Hamm, Edie Falco, James Gandolfini, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, a fistful of SNL alums (Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg), and another fistful of Daily Show veterans (Colbert, Helms, Oliver, Bee) were finding massive success on TV, they were still very much “TV stars.” There was a marked difference between Fred Armisen going from SNL to Portlandia and Adam Sandler going from SNL to The Wedding Singer. Armisen worked in the TV boutique. Sandler became, in capital letters, Really Really Famous.

These dual pathways birthed the misconception that TV was a bubble industry you had to pop if you wanted to take a professional leap. Ted Danson might be the greatest TV actor of all time, thanks to Cheers and CSI and Damages and The Good Place, but dang, there it is, he’s still a “TV actor.” This is Ted Danson. He’s one of our all-time greatest actors, period, but the fact that most of his career took place on the small screen puts a ceiling on how we perceive him.

Even as TV matured in the early 00s, its insularity kept it in a second-class position relative to film in the eyes of the public and the entertainment business. TV is where viewers saw their cultural family members—Jon Stewart was your cool uncle, Larry David was your funny grandpa, and Connie Britton was your mom while Kyle Chandler was your dad—but movies are where you went to watch artists: Streep, Scorsese, Field, Washington. TV was a feet-up-on-the-couch reprieve; movies were a lean-in exercise. These notions affected the way we saw the people in those parts of the entertainment business, and it affected the way those parts of the business related to the other. In other words, the differing perceptions of television and film meant the major players in either medium tended not to mix. You either took a permanent leap from one to the other—like George Clooney leaving ER to become a movie star—or you committed your career to one discipline.

And yet, Prestige TV’s undeniable redefinition of its medium in the 2000s opened the door just a bit for people outside of television to stick their heads through the crack and peek around at the opportunities. If longtime TV veterans like Berg and Chase and Gilligan were capitalizing on the artistic explosion to launch passion projects, why couldn’t an outsider? All it took was a good pitch, right?

Actually, yeah. That’s how True Detective landed a series order on HBO with a no-name writer and one of the most ambitious personnel structures TV had ever seen.

In 2010, Nic Pizzolatto was a writer, but really, he was more of a “writer.” He had a collection of short stories to his name and one novel, and while each of them won a few of the type of long-titled awards people list on resumes even though they’re super specialized and niche, neither book was a commercial success. You haven’t heard of them[2].

Pizzolatto had leveraged his work into a few professorial gigs at University of North Carolina and University of Chicago, but in 2010, he decided to strike out for LA to see if he could make it in the world of television. Under his arm was a new book he was working on called True Detective.

The reported story says Pizzolatto asserted himself almost right away as a singular creative entity in Hollywood, the TV-writer version of the cynical cop who tells his commanding officer, “I work alone.” Pizzolatto was lucky enough to land a job on the AMC crime drama The Killing[3], but left after two weeks, later expressing frustration with the writers’ room collaborative dynamic. Meanwhile, he turned True Detective into a pair of spec scripts and began shopping them around, pitching his own book as an adapted miniseries for which he’d write every episode himself.

It was an ambitious proposition. Pizzolatto was a relative nobody asking for an intense amount of creative privilege to adapt his own work, but at least with True Detective, that work seemed to speak for itself. Pizzolatto’s scripts were moody and philosophical. They had ideas beyond the crimes they depicted. His characters were complex and problematic in the tradition of many of Prestige TV’s great anti-heroes. This guy had the sauce. HBO ordered True Detective to series, committing to not just all eight episodes, but to giving Pizzolatto the auteur-esque position he wanted.

What might have sold HBO beyond Pizzolatto’s voice was True Detective’s structural concept. Pizzolatto pitched True Detective as an “anthology miniseries[4]”—a show that would tell a different story every season, with a different setting and a different cast.

TV had an anthology miniseries at the time—Ryan Murphy’s surprise hit American Horror Story on FX[5]—but even that show had some foundational differences with True Detective. American Horror Story recycled the same talent from season to season, only switching up the storylines, setting, and roles. This meant it could play around with style and tone and evolve with the times, but its behind-the-scenes construction, in terms of its personnel, was similar to more traditional TV shows. Talent was inclined to agree to multiple seasons of work, and American Horror Story still utilized typical workplace and workflow structures like a writer’s room and a rotation of directors.

Pizzolatto’s approach to True Detective made him the sole writer of every episode in season one[6]—“What I could never stand was the idea of putting your heart and soul into something, then having somebody else screw it up,” he’d later tell Rolling Stone—while giving a single person directing duties for the entire first season as well. Pizzolatto would keep each season contained, too, meaning on-camera talent wouldn’t have to commit to anything longer than eight episodes. Rather than hamstring the show, this approach made True Detective more attractive to busier (read: better) talent.

That’s how True Detective lands Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as its leads, two “no fucking way” casting deals that felt seismic when they were announced in 2013. Movie stars didn’t do TV shows. How did this happen?

McConaughey had been Pizzolatto’s big fish from Day One. The actor was a gravitational force in Hollywood in the early part of the decade, having broken out of type-casting prison in favor of more mature, more prestigious, more attention-grabbing parts. McConaughey’s charisma had been obvious since his scene-stealing role in Richard Linklater’s 1993 hangout movie Dazed and Confused, but up to this point it had only been leveraged in air-headed romantic comedies (Failure to Launch, How to Lose a Guy In 10 Days) or B-movie adventure flicks (Sahara, Fool’s Gold). In 2011, however, McConaughey headed up a stern legal thriller called The Lincoln Lawyer and a William Friedkin-directed crime comedy called Killer Joe[7]. The left-field choices weren’t a fluke, either. The next year brought him widespread acclaim for his parts in Mud (a really moody and distinctive Jeff Nichols movie) and Magic Mike (the Steven Soderbergh stripper movie that was so, so much better than anyone expected[8]).

By 2013, when True Detective is in pre-production and begins shooting, the so-called McConnaissance is in full swing. Around the same time, McConaughey secured an impossible-seeming Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, swiped a scene from Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street, and picked up the leading role in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

So True Detective grabbed Matthew McConaughey when he was as much of an out-and-out movie star as a Hollywood actor could be, and for someone of that caliber to come onboard a TV show was unheard of at the time.

After McConaughey agreed to True Detective, Harrelson was close behind (the guys are friends), bringing a sense of dramatic sturdiness to complement McConaughey’s (at the time, it seemed) stunt-adjacent casting[9]. The pair make a compelling duo, one that likely would have carried the show to a moderately successful first season regardless, but Pizzolatto added another ingredient that set True Detective apart: director Cary Fukunaga.

Pretentious TV conversations deploy the phrase “cinematic language” to describe how a show presents itself. It’s an exhausting, exclusive term (“language” implies a language barrier, after all), but nonetheless, True Detective crafted a cinematic language in a way few shows had before, and Cary Fukunaga deserves the credit. He had a flair for bringing Pizzolatto’s writing and the cast’s performances together in a way that felt like you were watching something you’d never seen on TV before (even if you actually had).

Fukunaga has a bizarre pre-Detective resumé. After failing to make it as a professional snowboarder, his landed his first job in Hollywood working a camera on Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” music video. In 2009, he released his first directorial feature, an immigration movie called Sin Nombre, before adapting Jane Eyre with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska[10]. Jane Eyre was praised for its style and brought Fukunaga some positive attention, but Fukunaga was frustrated with the compromises that came from translating a 700-page book into a movie. This tension attracted him to Pizzolatto’s model for True Detective, and in the end, he agreed to run the show’s first season[11].

Fukunaga and Pizzolatto are the perfect stylistic pairing. As True Detective premiered on HBO in 2014, it drew eyeballs not just for its A-list talent, but for its visual palette and regionality, too.

Pizzolatto made the unconventional choice to set the series in backwoods Louisiana, a decision that informed the music, production design, costuming, makeup, and story in a way that set True Detective apart from other crime shows at the time. You could glance at True Detective in passing and understand from the sweaty undershirts, deep-vocal guitar numbers, sallow faces, faded colors, and dusty furniture that it wasn’t some new iteration of CSI or even something like Sons of Anarchy or The Shield. It was dark and mature, but most of its action took place in the daylight, and rather than the tired city streets or alleyways or docks of crime shows past, McConaughey and Harrelson took their investigations to pop-up churches, hoarder houses, and redneck compounds bordering the swampland. The show looked hot and sticky and suspicious. It was a mood.

Fukunaga’s specificity in presenting the show’s hick-bayou locale lent itself well to the characters Pizzolatto created for McConaughey and Harrelson, too, if not always the mystery they had to solve. The murder at the center of True Detective had some compelling occult tinges and a grisly crime scene in the pilot, but after the first 20 minutes of the show, it fades to the background while the two leads battle their personal demons instead.

McConaughey plays Rust Cohle[12], the show’s aesthetic embodiment and philosophical voice box, while Harrelson plays Marty Hart, the guy who side-eyes and cracks wise at McConaughey’s musings. Rust is tight like razor wire, but you could sink right into Marty. They both have secrets. They both achieve instant icon status among modern TV characters.

Perhaps their success came in spite of the odds. Pizzolatto’s script brings plenty of style, one that’s complemented well by Fukunaga and captured to perfection by his leads, but holy smokes does it ask McConaughey in particular to throw some knuckleballs. True Detective receives its highest points of praise and its highest points of criticism for the same reason: its dialogue. Pretty much once per episode, McConaughey is asked to deliver a truly WTF-y speech. Here are examples of three:

“Why should I live in history, huh? Fuck, I don’t want to know anything anymore. This is a world where nothing is solved. Somebody once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself; we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”

“I have seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old, each one so sure of their realness. You know that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose and meaning. So certain that they were more than biological puppet. The truth wills out, and everybody sees. Once the strings are cut, all fall down.”

On the page, it’s such a juvenile attempt at profundity it’s almost embarrassing, but within McConaughey’s performance, it feels like the compelling product of a twisted-up man’s tragic worldview. Rust isn’t dead to the world, the world’s died around him, and that’s not a nuance you can read in Pizzolatto’s script. You can only pick that up watching McConaughey, and it helps when Harrelson gives one of his note-perfect “you gotta be fucking kidding me” eye rolls opposite.

You might notice True Detective’s musings are particularly masculine. There’s a little bit of 1970s war veteran in them, a little bit of Sopranos on meth, a little bit of chest puffing that only comes from someone who knows they have space to do such a thing. Pizzolatto’s waxing poetic gives the show the tiniest note of male privilege[13], something taken to task by True Detective critics.

Emily Nussbaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New Yorker, drew a line between the show’s dark ideas and its shallow approach to women, including Michelle Monaghan’s cliché-ridden role as Harrelson’s beleaguered wife and the myriad investigation scenes involving female sex workers. Nussbaum’s take: True Detective used female suffering (not the least of which was the murder victim at its center) as set decoration for Pizzolatto to spout his college-freshman worldviews. It’s not all-the-way unfair. Future seasons of True Detective would use hindsight to put a little more effort into creating complex female characters, but within the confines of the first season, you wish the show’s darkness wasn’t treated like something only men could grapple with.

Nonetheless, in the eyes of many, Pizzolatto’s macho posturizing worked like a complementary paradox with the rest of True Detective: These were disparate ingredients on their own, but somehow symbiotic together. The show hit incredible highs and even amid criticism for some of the content of their dialogue, McConaughey and Harrelson turned in two of the most heralded performances of the decade. On the strength of his show’s distinctiveness, Pizzolatto received a blank check to make whatever he wanted on screen for the foreseeable future. Cary Fukunaga, for his part, became one of the hottest directors in Hollywood[14].

Beyond its popularity and acclaim, True Detective’s “anthology miniseries” format made new structural practices commonplace as streaming platforms took up more and more of the market in the back half of the 2010s. In cutting its story off after eight episodes, the show provided an out for its in-demand talent and a creative backstop to Pizzolatto. The pervasion of this model incentivized bigger names to participate in what was suddenly a free-wheeling creative market. True Detective is why Big Little Lies could assemble Laura Dern, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Meryl Streep onto one cast in 2019. It’s why Jessica Biel, Kate Beckinsale, and Julia Roberts all headlined shows in the past three years. It’s why Emma Stone and Jonah Hill teamed up with Fukunaga for his own miniseries, Maniac, in 2018. TV isn’t just more accessible for big-name talent now. It’s become just as outright desirable as any major film project. Damian Chazelle, Steven Spielberg, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo del Toro, and J.J. Abrams all have entered the domain of the small screen.

Streaming played a huge part in popularizing flexible creative platforms. On Netflix and Hulu, there are no mandates on how much time shows have to fill, so creatives and showrunners can write as many episodes as a story demands, whether it be 5 or 25, then bail as soon as it’s over. The curse of the “bloated middle,” which arose when mandated episode orders forced traditional shows to contrive dumb subplots or deploy absurd twists to fill airtime, has evaporated.

Now, networks and cable channels have caught on, and TV is as freeform as it has ever been. NBC picks up its philosophy sitcom The Good Place for just a dozen 30-minute episodes at a time, and Atlanta appeared on FX for just 10 episodes in season one and 11 in season two. Damon Lindelof struggled in the mid-00s to stretch a season of Lost for 22 episodes, but when it came time for him to end The Leftovers on HBO in 2017, he had it done in eight tidy (terrific) hours. Pizzolatto constructed True Detective to be friendly to the creative process. Now, all of TV is friendly to the creative process, and that means the average show might be a little better than the average show a decade ago. People don’t have to compromise as much.

Ironically, however, True Detective itself fell prey to the system it created. Pizzolatto stayed on for another two seasons, but those didn’t reach the critical or creative highs of the first. Season two, in fact, was one of the most reviled things to grace HBO in years. Its casting was misguided (only Colin Farrell came out clean from a season that forced Rachel McAdams, Vince Vaughn, and Taylor Kitsch into parts they never should have touched), its style was incoherent (Fukunaga departed and was replaced with a typical TV rotation), and its story exposed Pizzolatto’s heady dialogue as self-parody. The more restrained third season benefitted a lot from Mahershala Ali in the starring role, but it didn’t move the broader cultural needle much. It came out in January 2019 but feels like it came out years ago.

True Detective is the best case and worst case for modern TV’s pro-creative structures. For a season, it delivered something that expanded the potential of its medium, from Pizzolatto’s writing to Fukunaga’s direction to McConaughey and Harrelson’s career-best performances. For two more seasons, it was indulgent and tiresome, but nevertheless, through its successes and failures, True Detective made TV a more exciting place. Now, a great show can come from anywhere.

[1] This includes people who functioned as singular entities, like David Milch (Hill Street Blues, Deadwood) and David Simon (The Wire). Those guys were heavily involved in writing almost every episode of their respective series, but their paths to that point are a little different because they were so unprecedentedly successful in the early going. The first TV script David Milch ever wrote, an episode of Hill Street Blues, won an Emmy, and Simon’s first TV project—Homicide: Life On the Street, based on a true-crime book he wrote about his Baltimore journalism days—nabbed three Peabody Awards. That’s, uh, not normal!

[2] His short story collection is Between Here and the Yellow Sea and his novel is Galveston. Told you.

[3] This probably doesn’t warrant a footnote, but The Killing sucked.

[4] Anthology shows tell a different story every episode. These hit a peak in the ‘50s and ‘60s with The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Miniseries only appear for a set number of episodes before ending, never running longer than a season. These had their moment in the ‘70s thanks to the ubiquity of Roots, Shogun, and Rich Man, Poor Man. Historically, both formats had a hard time sustaining themselves because audiences demonstrated a preference for more traditional formats.

[5] Ryan Murphy narrowly missed Touchstones. His show Glee hit TV in 2009, an easy contender for the highest, most unexpected peak in popularity this generation. Beyond its insane cultural pull, Glee launched and re-established tons of strong careers, too, from Lea Michele to Darren Criss to Jane Lynch. Don’t forget this show was also the last time we saw Gwyneth Paltrow in a really committed acting role (she’ll appear elsewhere in Touchstones). Other notable names who appeared on the show include Melissa Benoist (Whiplash, Supergirl), Jonathan Groff (Hamilton, Mindhunter), Blake Jenner (Edge of Seventeen, Everybody Wants Some!), and Grant Gustin (The Flash), plus there was a deep roster of celebrity cameos that can match just about any show of this era. Glee was enormous, and Ryan Murphy’s continued success in its wake with American Horror Story, Pose, American Crime Story, and Feud is a good example of the modern TV mogul.

[6] There’s a reason this isn’t common: It’s an unholy amount of work. Though he might be exaggerating, Pizzolatto told Rolling Stone that in the crunch to finish the scripts for True Detective’s first season, he would stay awake for 48 hours straight writing before sleeping up to 20 hours straight. He told Los Angeles Magazine: “My last two weeks of writing, my wife took our daughter to visit her parents and when they got back they found me on the recliner, shirtless, with empty bottles all around me.” While it’s easy to conjure sympathy for Pizzolatto here, there’s also a hint of skepticism over how much he did this because he had to, and how much he did this because he fell so hard for his own aesthetic.

[7] This is the William Freaking Friedkin who made The French Connection. McConaughey attaches himself to some amazing directors during this period, including Richard Linklater, Martin Scorsese, Jeff Nichols, Ben Stiller (yeah, great director!), Jean-Marc Valeé, Steven Soderbergh, and Christopher Nolan. He worked with all these guys inside a six-year period. *whistles, McConaughey-style*

[8] Magic Mike is probably a top-five McConaughey performance. He’s terrific in it. Put it on the shortlist with True Detective, Dazed and Confused, The Lincoln Lawyer, Mud, and…ugh, probably Interstellar for the one scene where he watches the video log from Jessica Chastain. McConaughey also does a ton of heavy lifting to sell that movie’s sentimental sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. Without him, it’s probably not taken half as seriously as a strong modern science fiction.

[9] Harrelson’s career doesn’t have the same tidy narrative as McConaughey’s. His choices before True Detective strike an odd balance between hefty-check blockbuster supporting parts (The Hunger Games and Now You See Me, which, remember when a movie about freakin’ magician thieves made enough money to launch a franchise?) and meaty second-or-third billing roles in mid-budget dramas (Out of the Furnace—a super underappreciated Harrelson turn—and Seven Psychopaths). In fact, the odd impression you have of Harrelson’s career is something not much more complicated than “working actor.” The guy has been in some amazing movies like The Thin Red Line and No Country for Old Men, but he’s also been in stuff like Friends With Benefits and Anger Management. And we haven’t even discussed his breakout roles on Cheers and White Men Can’t Jump. You’re never mad when Woody Harrelson shows up in something, but sometimes you sure are baffled.

[10] She was Alice in the Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland movies. You know her face more than her name.

[11] Fukunaga’s primary competition for the gig was none other than Alejandro González Iñárritu, eventual two-time winner of the Oscar for Best Director. It’s a fascinating sliding doors moment. Iñárritu nabs his Oscars in 2015 and 2016 for Birdman and The Revenant, so True Detective wouldn’t have necessarily pushed into those projects, but it would have certainly impacted the director’s trajectory.

[12] This groaner of a name would have killed any other show, but McConaughey is so good in the part and Fukunaga colors the world around Rust so well you have no choice but to think it’s perfect.

[13] Gender imbalance in both the stories being told and the storytellers themselves is a dogged legacy of this era of television. Dissecting this issue is for another chapter, but it’s worth pointing out how obviously male-gazey True Detective is from the vantage point of 2019 and 2020. This doesn’t make the show bad, just emblematic of the worst tendencies of its time.

[14] Fukunaga’s coming-out party was True Detective’s fourth episode, “Who Goes There.” The episode ends with a six-minute tracking shot of Rust as he escapes a nighttime raid with a suspect. It’s one of the most influential shots of the modern TV era in how it brought cinematic flair to the small screen. The sequence flexed an insane amount of ambition and artistry, expanding the boundaries of what future TV directors would attempt on their own shows. Some people bemoan long takes as showy, but in the final scene of “Who Goes There,” the absence of any cut serves terrific function. True Detective operated on multiple timelines, so viewers had already seen a future version of Rust who had obviously survived this shootout. Fukunaga said he was trying to find a way to deliver tension even with this “spoiler” already in the minds of viewers, so he deployed a continuous take to make you forget you were watching the past. It’s a brilliant construct. The sequence deserves every scrap of praise it receives.