True Detective is a descent into dystopia, a decadent deep south

Pick of the day: True Detective, from 1.35pm, BoxSets.

Matthew McConaughey is Rust Cohle in True Detective.

Pick of the day: True Detective, from 1.35pm, BoxSets.

Here’s another chance to catch the first season of True Detective, the superb if unsettling HBO cop series that achieved universal critical acclaim with copious Emmy nominations and an enormous social media presence.

People couldn’t get enough of its two central characters, Woody Harrelson’s good ol’ boy Martin Hart, a man of unravelling demons, and Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle, who views the world nihilistically as nothing but pain and suffering.

The season follows the way the lives of these two homicide cops collide and entangle during the long hunt for a killer, from the original investigation of a bizarre murder in 1995 to the reopening of the case nearly 20 years later.

The drama begins in the present when the detectives, no longer active, give statements about the long-ago murder of a prostitute, then moves back and forth in often dizzying cycles.

The two Louisiana cops prowl a territory that looks dystopian: a corrupted, degraded Eden that Washington forgot. It’s a landscape of deserted power plants, desolate burnt-out churches, highly armed drug-running bikers and isolated communities crawling with religious zealotry — a place where almost nothing or no one is who or what they seem to be.

Like the deep south of James Lee Burke’s novels, True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto’s state of Louisiana is a profoundly decadent world, its dissolution measured by the increasingly visible link between respectability and morally repugnant crime.

The second season featuring a different cast and locale was less successful, many critics blaming a script that seemed pedestrian by comparison to the first, finding it too dense and just too earnest.

HBO backed away from instantly commissioning a third series and for a while it looked grim for the breakthrough drama, but recent announcements have offered a glimmer of hope.