True Detective And Narrative Satisfaction

Last week the first season of True Detective came to a close. The show garnered a lot of interest, rave reviews, and a certain amount of controversy. It's an anthology show and this first season followed the story of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart over the course of two decades and a single case. The show has a singular and narrow perspective focusing exclusively on Cohle and Hart with almost no time spent on supporting characters.

The show struck a cord through a huge population and there is one clear reason why- True Detective is perfectly constructed. At its most basic level it is a complete and contained narrative. Questions are raised then answered. All episodes, all story-lines, all dialogue, all characters serve a narrow fiction. A number of elements weave together to strike a melodic singularity of storytelling.

McConaughey and Harrelson put in masterful performances. Layered, conflicted, spanning different points in their characters lives they provide depth. The dialogue is sharp, rich, and evocative. The story itself is focused on one particular case and one case only which is solved during the course of the show.

Because of its anthology format the show puts itself head and shoulders above other TV shows. It has no thought or incentive to extend the narrative beyond what is presented. The writers did not write themselves into a corner(like Lost) nor did they change the trajectory of the story mid-season(like The Killing). What was set up, promised and presented to the viewer was delivered.

The success of True Detective speaks more to the quality of other TV shows then to its own. Don't get me wrong it's a great show and I like its first season immensely. But people crave narratives that make sense, take them on a journey, then come to some kind of resolution, offer some kind of answer. Currently the state of TV is much more concerned with prolonging, with dragging out, with wringing as many Neilsen points as possible from any show that garners any interest, almost exclusively at the cost of narrative quality.

Humans delight in stories. This has been true since man scratched figures on cave walls with burnt sticks. Stories are a way to escape, to make sense of chaos, to offer answers to the unanswerable. When shows renew season after season we almost always receive diminishing returns. This is especially true of shows that revolve around crime or some kind of central mystery. See also Homeland and Flash Foward, even How I Met Your Mother. 

If you raise questions in a show your are obligated to provide answers. If you don't, well, isn't that just life?