True Detective

The first trailer for HBO’s newest prestige drama series has debuted, offering a glimpse of what it must be like to hang with longtime bros Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey—you know, smokin’, goin’ to the roller rinks, talkin’ about the ambiguous sense of morality that is the result of dwelling in a world permanently shadowed by darkness. This moody, arrestingly shot preview for the Cary Fukunaga-directed, eight-episode series—the first of a planned anthology, each with different stories and, presumably, movie stars—suggests True Detective could soon put Harrelson and McConaughey’s laconic Louisiana cops in the pantheon of TV antiheroes currently wrangling with those sorts of troubling questions, as they track a serial killer across 17 years of changing hairstyles, wardrobes, and understandings of how close to becoming a monster man has to get in order to catch one. “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door,” McConaughey drawls in what seems to be the show’s overarching philosophy. In other words, you just gotta keep livin’ along that thin line between good and evil.