6) True Detective
Moody, visually striking, impeccably acted and directed to a tee by Cary Joji Fukunaga, few television series made quite an impression on the small screen this year as True Detective. In fact, many of its hours feel more like excerpts from a big-screen film, whether it is the crowning achievements of its cast or its audacious style peaks, including an unforgettable, virtuoso six-minute tracking shot through a suburban warzone. Its nods to pulpy detective fiction, unreliable narration and macabre philosophizing gave Nic Pizzolatto’s series a unique flavour that stood apart from every other show on TV. It was bold and bleak at equal measure, but that only brought in a bigger audience.
Holding the murkiness and madness together were two tour-de-force performances. Woody Harrelson took a tired detective trope – the haggard investigator whose personal and work life is a slippery slope – and made it colorful and compelling. Matthew McConaughey, meanwhile, offered some of the finest hours of his career as the dazed and tormented Rust Cohle, trying to find a way out of his own darkness.
While the last hours of True Detective may have leaned too much on the conventional side, it is still hard to remember the last time a cable drama gripped the cultural consciousness so quickly and with such vitality. With ambitious storytelling and characters, one was willing to look through some of the show’s flaws to embrace a series that looked and sounded like no other on the small screen. Time has been little more than a flat circle as we keep waiting for the next series incarnation.