The HBO anthology True Detective is known for being extremely dark and controversial. I will only be focusing on season one of the anthology due its darkened tone. Season one focuses on two homicide detectives: Rust Cohle and Marty Hart. The season starts with them finding the body of a naked woman with deer antlers and a satanic emblem on her back. This is the beginning of a dark path for both of the "protagonists" in the show.
The show follows their journey in finding the serial killer that was behind the occult murders going on in Louisiana, and what they uncover affects them severely. Marty begins having an affair with his wife and Rust knows about it, but he doesn't do anything about it. Marty believes himself to be a good man, but his actions say differently. Once the detectives find who they believe to be the murderer, Marty finds two naked children in the murderer's house and rushes out with his gun raised. He shoots the murderer in the head point blank. Rust then helps Marty to cover up the scene, and they both lie about what happened to the police. This sets up Marty to be a hypocrite within the show, which is a vast parallel to Rust. Rust knows exactly who he is and what he is capable of, while Marty is unable to control his desires. The show continues to delve into the detectives' personal lives, which shows the darkness in both of their lives.
Rust had to go undercover for four years in a biker gang. He started doing various drugs while he was undercover and he may have participated in the killing of opposing gang members. This drug use continued even as a detective, and it started to make him have hallucinations in the middle of the day. This starts to makes the audience question the mental health of Rust. Rust also lost a daughter during her infancy and he believes the world is hell. He also believes that human beings were a "tragic misstep in evolution" because they became too self aware. Marty hates when Rust speaks like this because he wants to stay ignorant to the dark and true ideas coming from Rust's mind. This shows that Marty wants to keep his innocence intact even though he has committed acts such as adultery and murder.
The show starts to really make the audience question what it means to be good and evil. Simply because the characters are labeled as detectives, it makes the audience believe them to be the "protagonists". However, they are true anti-heroes because of what they do during their daily lives. Rust is a rampant drug user while on the job, and Marty has sex with someone other than this wife every few months. They both are extremely good at their jobs as detectives, and that is because they are dangerously similar the men they are trying to catch. They can easily get into the mind of the criminal because everyone has something that they're trying to hide, including the detectives.
Sources:
Decay of Humanity
Philosophy of True Detective
"He also believes that human beings were a "tragic misstep in evolution" because they became too self aware" - very interesting, perhaps you can elaborate in your next installment. The pragmatic tradition explicitly, and really all western traditions implicitly, treat self-awareness as an evolutionary adaptation that has conduced to our survival and progress. The idea that evolution is instead a liability has been little explored by philosophers, does the show explore it?
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