Police, Adjective: Cliché, Crime and Cartography in True Detective

So far spanning sixteen episodes in the form of two distinct, eight-part narratives, True Detective (2014– ) is a mixtape of riffs, tropes and motifs, chucking familiar fodder into the proverbial blender before chundering it out as garbled hotchpotch. If True Detective’s first season flirted repeatedly and even conceptually with the crime genre’s myriad clichés, its follow-up takes things to an almost parodic degree. Throughout both seasons, the time and attention our detectives devote to their task borders on the autistic. It’s why as viewers we remain invested in but always in some way detached from the fiction. And the hook on which our curiosities hang: good cop, bad news.

The integral (English) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!