The first season of True Detective, an American anthology crime drama television series created by Nic Pizzolatto, premiered on January 12, 2014, on the premium cable network HBO.

Constructed as a nonlinear narrative, season one focuses on Louisiana State Police homicide detectives Rustin "Rust" Cohle (McConaughey) and Martin "Marty" Hart (Harrelson), who investigated the murder of Dora Lange in 1995.

True Detective's first season explores themes of philosophical pessimism, masculinity, and Christianity; critics have analyzed the show's portrayal of women, its auteurist sensibility, and the influence of comics and weird horror fiction on its narrative.

State homicide detectives Martin "Marty" Hart and Rustin "Rust" Cohle investigate the murder of 28-year-old Dora Lange, whose body was found in a sugarcane field outside of Erath.

Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, a celebrated evangelist and cousin of the Louisiana governor, pushes the creation of a police task force focusing on "anti-Christian crimes."

[9] True Detective's anthology format required actors to commit to only a single season, so Pizzolatto was able to attract film stars who normally avoid television series because of their busy schedules.

[19][20] Harrelson stated that he joined True Detective partly because he wanted to work with certain people involved in the project, with whom he had previously collaborated in the 2012 HBO film Game Change.

"[29] Initially, True Detective's first season was due to shoot in Arkansas, but Pizzolatto later chose to film in Louisiana to take advantage of state tax incentives and the area's distinctive landscape:[30] "There's a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all ... everything lives under layers of concealment.

[28][29] Production staff constructed various set pieces, among them a scorched chapel, Joel Theriot's tent revival, and the Louisiana State Criminal Investigations Division offices, the last of which they built inside an abandoned light bulb warehouse near Elmwood.

[31] The scene in which Cohle, taking Ginger hostage, escapes a housing complex amidst gunfire, was captured in Bridge City as a single six-minute tracking shot, a technique Fukunaga had employed in Sin Nombre (2009) and Jane Eyre (2011).

[32][33] Shot in seven takes, preparation for the scene was extensive and demanding: McConaughey trained with Mark Norby to master a fighting style for his character,[32] and the nature of the shoot required a team of stunt coordinators, make-up artists, and special effects crew on hand during its entire course.

[28] The 2012 scenes were shot with Panavision Primo lenses: the visual palette in comparison was sharper and had much more contrast, lending a "modern, crisp feeling" to the images, and, according to Arkapaw, pulling "characters out from their environments to hopefully help audiences get inside their heads".

DiGerlando and Walsh went with a tripod design that showed a spiral when viewed from the base, and contained ladder-like crossing elements that symbolized the killer's desire to ascend to a dark spiritual plane.

[36] Using Richard Misrach's photography book Petrochemical America (2012) as a template, the production team initially photographed the local scenery, and the resulting images were woven together to form the core of the title sequence.

[39] Songs by Bo Diddley, Melvins, Primus, The Staple Singers, Grinderman, Wu-Tang Clan, Vashti Bunyan, Townes Van Zandt, Juice Newton, and Captain Beefheart appear in season one.

[48] Mathijs Peters, in a piece for Film International, argued that True Detective probes Schopenhauerian philosophy through its approach to individuality, self-denial, and the battle between dark and light.

Woodward wrote, "Biological programming gets recuperated and socially redistributed visions, faiths, and acerbic personalities take the reins of uncertain ends creating a world where 'people go away'.

For example, the crime drama Twin Peaks (1990–91) is often interpreted as a product of the contrasting visions of its co-creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, each of whom exercised varying degrees of control over the course of its first two seasons and later sequels.

[58] Colin Robertson at The List saw Twin Peaks as the most notable artistic antecedent to True Detective's first season, seeing that both shows challenge generic crime drama cliches and "use the genre conventions of a whodunnit-style mystery as a sublimely subversive diving board, and leap off from there to tell a broader story.

[57][59] Scott Timberg at Salon noted that Pizzolatto's previous writing experience was not in film or television but literary fiction, a "more purely auteurist form" for which total creative control by an individual author is the norm.

"[63] Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly has opined that the show becomes more self-aware through Cohle's harsh critiques of religion, which he viewed as a vehicle for commentary about pop culture escapism.

[64] Stapleton observed that the crimes on True Detective—through its victims and the implications of sacrifice and sexual violence—"respond to the conservative Christianity from which they originate, and seek to exploit the opportunities for the pleasure of transgression such a structure offers.

"[65] Theorist Edia Connole saw connections to Philip Marlowe and Le Morte d'Arthur's Lancelot in True Detective's presentation of Cohle, all "knights whose duty to their liege lord is tempered with devotion to God.

Christopher Lirette of Southern Spaces said the show was about "men living in a brutally masculine world" and women are depicted as "things-to-be-saved and erotic obstacles" à la Double Indemnity (1944) and Chinatown (1974).

[68] Slate's Willa Paskin said True Detective's depiction of its female characters—as sex workers, the deceased and "a nagging wife"—seemed to reveal an intent to reflect the protagonists' "blinkered worldview and the very masculine, Southern cop culture they inhabited".

[74] Maggie, in Wilson's interpretation, is portrayed as the superegoic wife who "constantly makes demands on her guilty husband or partner tying him or her down and deflecting him or her from his symbolic role as police".

[74] The philosopher Erin K. Stapleton subscribes to the theory that Dora Lange's corpse serves to "provide the initial territory or orientation through which the communities of True Detective are formed.

[87][93][94] The characterization received mixed reviews: Cohle's speeches, described by HuffPost as "mesmerizing monologues",[94] and by Vanity Fair as dense and interesting material,[89] were criticized by the New York Post as "'70s-era psycho-babble" which slowed down the story.

[96] Emily Nussbaum, writing for The New Yorker, was also critical, considering the real story to be "a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses"; she described the philosophical monologues as "dorm-room deep talk" and argued that the show had "fallen for its own sales pitch".

[105] By March 2014, HBO had submitted True Detective as a drama series contender,[106][107][108] an unconventional move given the show's anthology format and fierce competition from the likes of Breaking Bad and House of Cards.