When the first season of Nic Pizzolatto's "True Detective" debuted on HBO on January 12, 2014, television viewers got swept up in a peculiar, ominous mystery driven by two perfectly paired stars in Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. The entire run had a rare stylistic cohesiveness due to every episode being written by Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, and it got its hooks in deep by placing an occult, almost Lovecraftian spin on its serial killer narrative.

By the end of that first season, we'd been treated to a spaced-out acting masterclass by McConaughey, whose Louisiana State Detective Rust Cohle would trail off on bizarre monologues where he made such profound-seeming observations as "time is a flat circle." I could never decide if Cohle was full of it or legitima

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