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Recommending True Detectives


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Just finished the first and only season yet to have been released. I highly recommend it with excellent acting by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as protagonists. It raises some questions about the treatment of children in our society (Paraphrasing McConaughey's character, we eat our children) and has a really cool plot that works on many levels. The cinematography is beautiful too.

 

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2356777/?ref_=nv_sr_1

 

If anyone has seen it, please let me know what you think of it :)

 

Edit: Correction, the name of the series is "True Detective" in singular, not in plural as I wrote in the title of the thread. I also have to warn about a few stomach turning scenes.

Edited by Avalanche
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I've heard some people call this a show on par with Breaking Bad for character development.  Would you agree?

 

The characters are just as complex if not more so, but with one season they don't get the same kind of journey. (Though for only 8 episodes it feels quite long) I concur with Avalanche that it's pretty dark, but there are some funny moments between the main characters and personally I found the ending more satisfying than anything I've seen in a while. If you like intelligent, insightful dialogue, intricate characters, and an actual mystery (instead of LOST-style cliffhangers) it's one of the best shows out there. It's very much a slow burn type show but that shouldn't discourage the FDR crowd. Definitely brace yourself for some scenes though...

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I've heard some people call this a show on par with Breaking Bad for character development.  Would you agree?

 I was only able to watch BB until the blood from this guy who had been dissolved in the bathtub was dripping from the above floor, so I wouldn't know. But I skimmed the imdb message board, and people are arguing like crazy over there on whether BB or True Detective are the best series. I think that is a good sign :)

Did you notice, cynicist, when Matthew and Woody were arguing about choices and personal responsibility. That Matthew put the responsibility on Woody for that the wife of Woody "were driven into cheating by Woody". I am in no way trying to dissolve Woody and Matthew from what they are responsible for, but I think this would be an example of infantilization of women and the degree to which they are not assigned responsibility for their choices, don't you think?

 

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Did you notice, cynicist, when Matthew and Woody were arguing about choices and personal responsibility. That Matthew put the responsibility on Woody for that the wife of Woody "were driven into cheating by Woody". I am in no way trying to dissolve Woody and Matthew from what they are responsible for, but I think this would be an example of infantilization of women and the degree to which they are not assigned responsibility for their choices, don't you think?

 

 

This board supports spoiler tags fyi. You can click on the button next to the eraser (looks like a window with green and blue lines in it and says 'Special BBCode' when your mouse hovers over it) and then choose 'spoiler', it just adds ([][/]) brackets with the word spoiler between them.

 

As to the actual question:

 

 

I completely agree with you and thought the same thing while watching it. It's just taking complete responsibility away from Marty's wife for marrying and staying with him and for choosing to cheat in the first place. It was weird to see that, because Rust was actually really pissed at her for coming over and doing that (so in that instance he was saying that she was responsible) and he also took away responsibility from himself for going through with it which was weird because he let Marty beat him up over it (It wouldn't make sense to do that if he wasn't responsible to some degree). At the same time he had some weird views on humanity though, if you remember his chat in the car with Marty, so I'm sure it all made sense to him somehow lol. (He is basically a determinist, and thinks that consciousness was a kind of mistake of nature)  

 

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can't help but notice how dark, evil, and decadent some show's plots, and characters are getting in recent years.  Breaking Bad, True Detective, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Vikings - I have only seen one show, or less, of each of these and I could not continue.  I am amazed that these are all so highly rated.  I must be somehow different but I cannot tolerate such wickedness.  

 

That said, the production, sets, directing, and esp the acting are stellar.  Still, I just don't have the stomach for what they are portraying and getting us accustomed to taking in with this stuff.  

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This board supports spoiler tags fyi. You can click on the button next to the eraser (looks like a window with green and blue lines in it and says 'Special BBCode' when your mouse hovers over it) and then choose 'spoiler', it just adds ([][/]) brackets with the word spoiler between them.

 

As to the actual question:

 

 

I completely agree with you and thought the same thing while watching it. It's just taking complete responsibility away from Marty's wife for marrying and staying with him and for choosing to cheat in the first place. It was weird to see that, because Rust was actually really pissed at her for coming over and doing that (so in that instance he was saying that she was responsible) and he also took away responsibility from himself for going through with it which was weird because he let Marty beat him up over it (It wouldn't make sense to do that if he wasn't responsible to some degree). At the same time he had some weird views on humanity though, if you remember his chat in the car with Marty, so I'm sure it all made sense to him somehow lol. (He is basically a determinist, and thinks that consciousness was a kind of mistake of nature)  

 

Thanks for the info. I added it now.

 

 

 

Yeah, Marty was just a big screaming paradox for the most part. Long time since I have liked a fictional character as much as him though (maybe Tyler Durden in Fight Club was the last character I liked this much). He went over himself to find and stop that monster, and he did atleast have some remnants of philosophy in him. His catharsis over his lost daughter in the final episode also put him in a sympathetic light.

 

 

 

can't help but notice how dark, evil, and decadent some show's plots, and characters are getting in recent years.  Breaking Bad, True Detective, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Vikings - I have only seen one show, or less, of each of these and I could not continue.  I am amazed that these are all so highly rated.  I must be somehow different but I cannot tolerate such wickedness.  

 

That said, the production, sets, directing, and esp the acting are stellar.  Still, I just don't have the stomach for what they are portraying and getting us accustomed to taking in with this stuff.  

 

That is totally understandable. I had to turn down the sound completely in the last scenes of True Detective because it got to intense for me. I prefer the darkness to glossy series like West Wing though.

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Oh no I loved the character despite some of his craziness, because he seemed to genuinely have a good heart and want to do the right thing even if it was hard. 

 

 

Which wouldn't have made any sense to me at all without the context of his daughter dying. After I learned that, I could see his motivation for trying to achieve any good in a world that he basically saw as irredeemable.

 

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  • 2 months later...

I loved this show. 

 

Am quoting this word-for-word from a fan-post on Alan Sepinwall's hitfix.com message board:

 

--------------------

 

"Cole, do you like Doritos?""Nah, man. I don't believe in Doritos. Doritos are just some bullshit faux pleasure mankind invented to convince ourselves that we're special. We used our 'God-given' gift of ingenuity to fabricate the taste of naturally occurring flavors with chemical compounds and fucking starches, man. And that's what we are, really. We're not original, unique organisms. We're 44 flavors of fuck-all masquerading as something genuine. The human race is made up of slight variants of the same goddamn bland corn chip, each one covered in a different amount of orangish-red cheese dust that we call a soul. I believe in lawn chairs for furniture, getting drunk by noon, and cutting my own ponytail. That's what I believe in. But Doritos? Nah, man. I've had my fill of lies."  

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My favourite scene: 

 

I like how they show fatherlessness as the cause of a lot of the problems. The scene where Rust talks about the flat circle (everything happens over and over again), the scene where Marty slaps his daughter for having a threesome at a young age, and the scene where he admits that he should have spent more time with them. If he and others had of been better fathers there wouldn't have been so much drug and sex abuse.

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