"True Detective" is no H.P. Lovecraft story

The HBO series is a slick 8-hour neo-noir that ultimately fails to carry the weight of its literary references

Published March 11, 2014 12:15PM (EDT)

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in "True Detective"                  (HBO)
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in "True Detective" (HBO)

This piece originally appeared on Pajiba.

Pajiba Even putting aside all the theories that didn’t come to fruition in the season finale of True Detective — and the expectations borne from them — there still has to be some lingering disappointment with the straightforwardness of the ending. As Rust Cohle noted in the coda, it’s all about lightness and dark, and that’s essentially what it came down to in the series: A very black and white, good guy vs. bad guy ending, and as if to reiterate who the good guys were, Marty Hart’s doting family — with whom he hasn’t had any real contact in two years — visited him in the hospital to show him support, lending even more credibility to the arguments about the thinness of the female characters all season long. Yes, it turns out, they were ornamentation: Boobs and pink panties and sexual conquests and doormats with which the ultimate male heroes could step upon and exploit.

But that’s not my biggest disappointment with the True Detective finale. My chief argument against the series was that it simply wasn’t literary enough.

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By Dustin Rowles

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