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Please Watch True Detective and Justified

  • Writer: Aidan J
    Aidan J
  • Jan 29, 2019
  • 5 min read

With thousands of movies, books, TV shows, and videogames at our disposal, choosing what we want to do with our time can be stressful. Actually, I take that back; it’s not stressful, but sometimes I wish I was using my time better. I don’t want to be wasting my precious free time, you know?


All these people are bored. They need to watch something interesting, like a, a, uh, detective television series!

Recently, I’ve been watching two detective shows—True Detective and Justified. I have seen the first season of both shows, and while I like them both, they have different attractive qualities, despite their similarities. Seriously, they both take place in hillbilly areas (Harlan county of Kentucky and the outskirts of Louisiana), they both feature a pseudoreligious diviner (Walton Goggin’s character and Matthew McConaughey’s character in the picture below, respectively), and they both have multiple scenes of adultery. Classy.



Once again, these two shows star detectives as their leads, but they’re portrayed very differently. Raylan Givens, the lead of Justified, is a US Marshall who was transferred back to his provincial home after he shot a mobster in Miami. He’s a gun-toting, quick-on-the-draw cowboy that can judge anyone’s character instantly and defuse any situation he pleases—sometimes violently but sometimes peacefully. He’s a man’s man, and, played by Timothy Olyphant, he’s also quite a pretty boy. One-off episodes focus on his ability to solve any situation, while sequences of episodes that are narratively attached tend to show him a little more human; he’s merely nibbling on the plans of all the big criminal players in Harlan county.


Oh, this is Raylan Givens, and I'm justified to shoot you. Now don't you move and come to jail.

My criticism of the show stems from its macho-cop fantasy that focuses solely on the plot and how Raylan will save the day. While Raylan is flawed (he comes from a criminal background and has anger issues), there are so many guns and criminal acts around a small county that the show cannot pretend to emulate anything realistic. In every confrontation, the bad guys know that Raylan has two guns on him, and every confrontation, Raylan takes advantage of a character flaw to arrest or kill the bad guy.


I don't mean to rag on the show. The gun thing is just a fun little quirk, but seriously, who needs two pistols in a bar?

The two detectives in True Detective (season one) are quite different. Rust Cohle is an ex-undercover cop that served too many years in drug gangs; the experience made him jaded and causes him to hallucinate even twenty years after. That, and a daughter who passed from being hit by a car that leads to a nasty divorce, makes him an incredibly angsty antihero, saying cryptic lines like “time is a flat circle” and “I think human consciousness is a mistake.” That being said, he is a brilliant detective, and trades his empathy for his fellow human beings for perfectly assessing other characters in the show and clues for the case. He really is a True Detective. His partner, Morty Hart, is flawed in that he’s an unaware philanderer that tears apart his family because he cannot see what is important in his life. Yet he still serves as the emotional, “normal” foil to Rust. Together, they forged a buddy cop relationship out of a mixture of hate and apathy for each other. Surprisingly, Matthew McConaughey (Rust Cohle) and Woody Harrelson (Morty Hart) both come from romcoms, which might explain why their chemistry work.



True Detective still has a romantic element, but it’s very dark. The show glorifies the decrepitude and sinful nature of characters, but somehow, I even loved the gloomy, brooding Rust Cohle. For instance, several scenes show his rudimentary apartment. He has no furniture; after work, he sits in the middle of his room reading how criminal minds function, and before falling asleep, contemplates Christ’s crucifixion. The total devotion to his job and his depressing philosophy, no matter how brutal he is, is an ideal that most of us are drawn to. In True Detective, we aren’t fans of characters, really, but instead we are fans of what they represent.


Take a breather, I’m going deeper.

The show shows characters that have human traits, but these characters represent archetypes. Maybe a better word than archetype is a platonic form. They fully embody a concept or part of the human psyche that intrigues us, and, considering Morty Hart, while we do not want to cheat on our wife, we also envy the control the Morty has and would like that for ourselves. Unfortunately, in real life, people cannot embody these abstract ideas, no matter how much one may try. This creates some sort of unattainability in these characters, breaking our concern with mundane affairs, like how I never saw Morty or Rust blow their noses. Since everyone’s neutral expression is a scowl, and the buddy cops’ dialogue cannot muster any amount of friendliness, we can see the director creates a foreboding, moody atmosphere. The pure drama of the show has led many critics to claim the first season of True Detective as the greatest television ever made.


There's not even a joke after this. That's all it says. That's dark.

The two shows are both fantasies. They are something nice to sink your teeth into that remove you from your everyday problems into fiction, and so I think of them as valuable sources of entertainment—this is a very long way of saying they’re enjoyable to watch. If you’re more into moods and darkness and themes and cinematography, I would watch True Detective. If you like a cowboy-detective type character that’s a gunslinger and wears a ten-gallon hat, Justified is your show. Or, you can watch both like I did. It should also be said that True Detective is an eight-hour show, eight hour-long episodes, whereas Justified has six seasons with upwards of ten episodes per season. True Detective is much more entertaining per minute, whereas Justified has more content and will thus give you more pleasure overall.


Hey, my name is Raylan Givens, and you're stuck with me for hundreds of hours with the Kentucky twang in my voice.

I normally have a why in my blog posts. The truth is that I wrote this article to encourage people to watch both of these shows. I could say something philosophical, like living through television is not any better or worse than living your own life, but really I just want to discuss the shows with more people. The creators behind both shows put in so much effort and so much skill that should be honored, just like great movie directors like Alfred Hitchcock and great writers like Edgar Allen Poe.


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