True and not so true detectives

While enjoying temporary access to HBO I'm also, sort of, enjoying True Detective - not a great series on the order of The Sopranos or The Wire but pretty entertaining and tantalizing. More than anything, it's about the relationship of the two detectives on the case, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, temperamental opposites yoked together - MM (Rust Cohle) a damaged loner existentialist introvert and Harrelson (Marty Hart) a tough, philandering family man Louisiana cop. The highlights are the long dialogs the two engage in during their long drives across the delta in pursuit of a case, subjects for easy parody of course and also peculiar and elusive - is MM brilliant of sophomoric, or both? The structure of the series is really smart - as the two men are each being interrogated by fellow Louisiana state troopers about a long-ago case - and we move back and forth between this present-day interrogation and the enactment of the case under review, from circa 1995. The two men look quite different in the present (it seems they make Harrelson much younger for the '95 scenes and MM older and far more ruined in the present day); we don't know what's happened to the characters in the interval, nor why the case is under review, and of course over time the strands will weave together. Other highlights are great music from T Bone Burnett and extraordinary cinematography of a region - the delta - seldom seen in such detail. Great shots of oil rigs across the flats, run down communities in the bayous, etc. The weakness, unfortunately, is the relatively uninteresting case at the heart of it all: an investigation of a ritualistic killing with religious iconographic overtones: big nod here to Stieg Larsson, but at least in TD the police aren't the stupidest people on the planet. Despite all of MM's ruminations on being and nothingness, the skills the two men bring to solving this case are pretty rudimentary: poring through old files looking for other  possible ritual killings, a long series of interview each of which yields a valuable clue that they dutifully follow up w/ another interview (gosh, well, she used to work at this brother; gosh, yes, she used to go to a church; gosh, it's strange, someone burned down our church, and so on - that is, the detectives never have to use their intelligence or wits to unearth the facts). The joke is, I guess, that these guys are not really "true detectives," and certainly not in the vein of the True Detective magazine - they're true eccentrics, that is to say, they're characters - in an HBO series.