True Detective Seasons Ranked

I remember the moment I realized how much I love television. It was March 2, 2014, and for the first time in years, I skipped the Oscar telecast completely. I did it to watch a new episode of “True Detective,” which was nearing the end of its phenomenal, influential, heavily-discussed first season. The show’s grip on American pop culture that year was incredible: It won five Emmys, inspired countless parodies, and lit up the internet with theories and Easter egg hunts. People read Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow” after the word “Carcosa” popped up in the show. Viewers made gifs and edits of every single shot of Matthew McConaughey’s hilariously bleak protagonist. And, importantly, people in Hollywood clearly started searching for the next “True Detective.”

In the years that followed the show’s first season, a whole host of TV series appeared that clearly followed the “True Detective” rulebook: Slow-burn criminal investigations, deeply messed-up antiheroes, and a sort of crime scene body horror that relished shots of the deceased (typically brutalized women). Sometimes the shows commented on the “True Detective” formula, while other times, they just aped it. “The Night Of,” “Sharp Objects,” “Mare of Easttown,” “Mindhunter,” and HBO’s “Perry Mason” are arguably part of the “True Detective” family tree (some are also clearly influenced by earlier series “The Killing”), as are many, many less memorable shows.

As “True Detective” continued to shape the TV landscape, its own star quickly fell. A second season was poorly received, while a third recaptured some of the original’s magic. The latest installment, released 10 years after the original and subtitled “Night Country,” riled up some series purists yet stands as the most critically acclaimed installment yet (by one percentage point!). A decade on, how does each season of “True Detective” stack up? You can of course decide for yourself, but in the meantime, here’s how we see it.

The second season of “True Detective” has by now become synonymous with “prestige TV letdown.” The scuzzy city-set noir aimed to walk in the footsteps of cinematic standouts like “Chinatown” and “Lost Highway,” but instead, it mostly turns out to be a jumble of big ideas that never fully come together. An odd ensemble cast including Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, Taylor Kitsch, and Colin Farrell makes the most of uneven material, and the season is ultimately a case of great performances in a less-than-great story. It’s also the first season to feature multiple directors, replacing the uniformly striking first season’s aesthetics (where every episode was directed by Cary Fukunaga) with a talented yet slightly less cohesive slate of filmmakers including Miguel Sapochnik and Justin Lin.

Series creator Nic Pizzolatto appeared on the TV scene as an auteur-in-the-making during the show’s first season, but with its second attempt, it became clear that “True Detective” worked best when the storyteller’s more excessive creative impulses were reined in. Season 2 features a murder investigation at the center of a major conspiracy, but it also has sex trafficking, creepy masked men, torture, casino arson, a meth lab, a kidnapping cold case, and a subplot about diamonds stolen during the L.A. riots. In some ways, season 2 of “True Detective” is better than you remember, but in other ways, it’s worse. It’s somehow both overstuffed and underdeveloped, and it suffers partly because it breaks the simple, unspoken rule every other season obeys: Just stick with two investigators.

The biggest sin season 3 of “True Detective” commits is being forgettable. It’s an ironic problem, given that its genuinely pretty great storyline plays with the idea of memory and its fallibility more directly than any before or since. The season moves the action back to rural America, where directors including Jeremy Saulnier capture the creeping dread of the Ozarks while writers Pizzolato and David Milch, the mastermind behind “Deadwood,” chart a complex, multi-timeline mystery.

Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff anchor the season as two detectives investigating the grim death of one child and the disappearance of another. Ali is fantastic as always, even when acting through old man makeup, while Dorff is perhaps one of the most underrated performers of the whole series. The supporting cast is also rock solid, with Scoot McNairy appearing as the sketchy, sad dad of the missing kids and Carmen Ejogo holding her own against Ali as his character’s wife.

By 2019, audiences’ taste for extremely macabre, gloomy-looking slow-burn murder shows had waned a bit, so the show at times suffered from pacing issues. Yet it benefits from a more wide-ranging tone than its predecessors, as it skillfully interweaves a love story and family drama into the fabric of its mystery. It also offers what is perhaps the series’ best conclusion to date: A happy ending that no one knows about, as our dementia-stricken detective forgets about it right after he finally puts all the clues together.

The first season of “True Detective” hit HBO like a bolt of lightning, scorching the earth with its audacity and changing the surrounding TV landscape forever. By now, it’s become a landmark of 2010s television, a work by which years’ worth of works that came after can be judged. “It’s no ‘True Detective,'” we’d say in the years following 2014, or if you were a stubborn holdout who’d grown tired of its tropes early on, “Ugh, another ‘True Detective.'” Those exhausted with the show had a point: It’s threaded through with nihilism, misogyny, and Satanic Panic-style debunked conspiracy, all of which are intentional in the building of the show’s seedy, near-mythical portrait of a Louisiana underworld.

Despite its widely-discussed (and subjective, of course) faults, “True Detective” season 1 was a bona fide small-screen masterpiece. As insufferably moody sleuth Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey gave the most surprising performance of his career to date during a time when it was still a shock each time an A-list star chose to do so on TV. Woody Harrelson’s normie womanizer Marty Hart countered Rust’s weirdness perfectly, while Michelle Monaghan gave her all to a thankless role as the woman caught between the two of them.

As captivating as its central character dynamic was, “True Detective” season 1 had plenty of other parts worth lauding, from a non-linear narrative that expertly built suspense to a barrage of strange literary references to the truly eerie occult mystery at its center. One part mystery, one part philosophical exercise, one part folk horror, the visually dazzling show kept audiences guessing to the very end. I had nightmares nearly every night the first time I watched “True Detective” season 1, which is only appropriate given that its eight episodes amount to one of the most convincing slow-burn nightmares ever put on film.

To properly give “True Detective: Night Country” the credit it’s due, it’s important to note that it’s both a distinctly separate series (Issa López created, wrote, and directed it, while Pizzolatto was not involved and was weird about it), and a show with deep ties to the 2014 original. “Night Country,” an Alaska-set story that tilts more towards the supernatural than prior outings, would be phenomenal as a standalone mystery, but it’s even better as a season that builds on — and boldly subverts — the world of “True Detective” as we know it.

The series pairs two deeply imperfect investigators, played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, as they investigate the mysterious disappearance of a group of scientists doing research near their remote Alaskan town. Like season 1, it’s a story with wide-ranging and powerful influences, from baroque artwork to Inuit mythology to John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” “Night Country” reactivates the folk horror aspects and H.P. Lovecraft influences from season 1 in a more meaningful context, skipping the show’s typical “stranger danger” scary story to instead examine themes of Indigenous community, motherhood and loss, the messiness of justice, and the struggle to survive in darkness — literal or otherwise.

To measure “True Detective: Night Country” against the show’s first season is tough, as each does some things much better than the other. The first season is gorgeous, and its non-chronological saga perfects a vein of storytelling that’s existed for a long time. “Night Country” is jam-packed with captivating details, and it entirely reimagines what neo-noir can look like without the guardrails of a single genre or point-of-view. Neither season fully sticks their landings, but both remain incredible upon rewatch. Still, “Night Country” deserves one extra point for creativity: It managed to blow open a genre — moody, prestigious cable crime dramas — that had previously seemed all but dead after a decade’s worth of imitators. After all this time, it turns out the only crime show that could top “True Detective” was “True Detective.”