Patrick Freyne: ‘True Detective’ is telly at its dourest

Someone who looks like Vince Vaughn is lying in bed staring at a water stain on the ceiling of his mansion. He is recalling, at length, how his drunk father once left him locked in a basement. He felt a rat nibbling his hand, he says. “I just kept smashing till there was nothing left but goo . . . Two more days I was in there in the dark until my dad came home.”

Vince pauses. “Anyhoo, that’s why I made Wedding Crashers.”

It's the second episode of the second series of True Detective (Sky Atlantic) and this Vincentian soliloquy is the opening scene. It's longer than I've recounted and ends with Vaughn's mobster, and many viewers, wondering aloud if he is not already dead.

We then cut to our three anti-heroic cops, who came together at the end of the first episode, and are now bonding around a corpse. The corpse is a city manager and Vince Vaughn’s business partner. (Owen Wilson?) His eyes have been melted away and his genitals shot off (probably not Owen Wilson so).

Nonetheless, the corpse steals the scene (Owen Wilson?) when we see his gruesomely destroyed undercarriage, which is HBO’s way of saying: “We will show all the female nudity we want but we would rather shoot off a man’s genitals than show you a penis.”

Last week we flashed back to Colin Farrell’s character, Ray Velcoro, fresh- faced and clean-shaven. Nowadays he has a moustache of sadness. He is sad because after his ex-wife was raped and her rapist was killed, somehow everything wasn’t all about him. He is a punchy fellow who does not drink in moderation. He’s in hock to Vince Vaughn, and after last week, when he attacked the father of his child’s bully, his ex-wife no longer wants him sharing custody.

Key word is ‘decent’

“You used to have something,” she says. “A decency. You were good at being decent until something happened [Daredevil, probably] and you weren’t strong enough to stay decent [Miami Vice?].”

Okay Ray, I think, just prove to her that you’re the kind of calm, reasonable individual who can co-parent a child. “You won’t get away with it. I will burn this entire fucking city to the ground first,” screams Ray, reasonably.

The other cops include Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), who makes up a whole quarter of the main cast in a nod to changing demographics (women will make up at least a quarter of the American population by 2016).

Antigone also has a “dark past” because you’re not allowed be a TV policeperson without one. (There’s a special form, I think.) She has daddy issues, a dead mum and a chip on her shoulder about gender because, you know, bitches be crazy.

She and Ray drive around making small talk. She says she could kill any man who lays a hand on her. He laments the decline of blue-collar America, but lightens the mood by telling her he’s a corrupt alcoholic who may have killed his wife’s rapist. They’re a hoot. If Rachel also had a moustache of sadness, I would dub them The Two Ronnies.

There’s also Taylor Kitsch, who has an oedipally flirtatious mother, a death wish, mysterious shoulder scars, homophobia and the dreamiest eyes.

All are trying to discover who killed the mutilated corpse. But it’s going to take ages because these cops believe in a work-dysfunction balance and the union allows them time to brood.

So Vaughn meets an associate at a brothel, locates the corpse’s secret sex pad, and tells Ray, who goes there. This, quite frankly, turns out to be a total pain in the chest, when – SPOILER ALERT – Ray is shot in the chest.

True Detective creakily effects significance with its humourless grumps and portentous dialogue. In contrast, the third season of prison-drama Orange Is the New Black (Netflix) skips lightly through bigger themes with episodic vignettes and humour.

True Detective evokes biblical good and evil, but there are almost no bad or good people in OITNB, just unfortunate circumstances and an unfair system. People who do horrible things are still capable of kindness a few episodes later.

Prism of prison

Sometimes the show reminds me of boarding school stories, with its midnight feasts (Red’s special dinners), japes (Piper’s soiled underwear business) and intense girl crushes (the little cult that builds around Norma). But it’s a boarding school story with lots to say about gender, class, faith, transphobia, rape, commerce, worker’s rights and, in this series, prison privatisation.

It used to bother me that OITNB was too kind to its characters, that it was a little soft-headed in being soft-hearted. But for all its kindness, the picture it paints of American inequality is deeply sad. The writers just prefer to present it with compassion and wit.

While Colin Farrell can, in True Detective, grimly mutter that "we get the world we deserve", few characters in Orange Is the New Black deserve the world they live in. But they don't whinge quite so dourly. and I like watching them a lot more.