True Detective on HBO
 

Enjoyed this series. Even my wife was into it, which was a little surprising to me given how dark it is.

It's hard to think of any other show that has had this level of popularity that spends so much time on metaphysical musings. It can get away with it because of the quality of the acting, writing, directing, art direction, and music. It's just that evocative that the characters can sit in a car and ponder the universe.

SLIGHT SPOILER. At the end the nihilistic character Rust relates what we might call a near-death experience. That he experienced the love of his dead child and all he had to do was let go to join it, and he did let go. But he woke up alive instead. I was reading a review on Slate that was very critical of this. Why? You can't be a liberal hipster and actually give credence to any kind of religious transformation that takes one from less religious to more religious. Unless someone is zany or cuckoo, or the overall context is to make fun of religion (Book of Mormon musical). And really it is hardly religious. That is, there is no talk of God or Jesus or anything like that. Just an implication of life after death. Or something after death. Or something in death.

The show isn't about the bad guys. It's about the guys themselves. The detectives who are a mixture of good and bad. It's about their relationship and search. It's about how they changed and how they decided to find meaning in their lives. The actual particulars of the case were incidental to that. Of course dumb people being dumb, many missed that.

What is the nature of evil? Does it really exist in some real cosmic sense? Or is it just a characteristic of our weaker parts? I think that's one question that the series brings up. I think this noir piece decides that evil does exist. "True detective." True and False--a dichotomy with no middle ground.

This was definitely a "rated-R" TV show. But as far as really making me think about life and death and meaning and experience, you won't see a lot on TV that surpasses this. It had its faults, and I'm not sure it is as deep as it wants to be. But dang it, you could waste a lot of time on other things before you felt like you had wasted your time with this.