I adored season 1 and its story. I’ve noticed the IMDb scores aren’t as high for season 2. Is it still worth a watch?

id love to talk about it with people with open minds and big hearts 💕

I’ll probably watch the first episode and if it’s as cringe as Night Country I’ll hate-watch the rest of the season, if I can. But skipping it completely is not off the table.

What do we think? :/

i am having the hardest time trying to find out where / what his chest tattoo could mean? it shows up in his introduction video so he had to of gotten it pre-93, which could of been in his alaskan or texan childhood or young adult years.

if anyone has ANY!! information please let me know ☺️

we know it is not:

a cattle brand

it might be:

viking bind ruins ?

That final sequence is devastating in a way that's sweet and tender and hopeful, and it tells you that it all works out in the end. Then it cuts to the memory flashback and it makes you think "oh god they're gonna zag to something sad." But that last scene in the bar just doubles down on the happy ending. Real rollercoaster.

The show deliberately leaves the lore and theology of the Tuttle Cult open to interpretation.

I like imagining that True Detective’s first season literally takes place within the canon of the Cthulhu Mythos, and that someone involved in founding the cult had a brief, partial encounter with Hastur (a.k.a the Yellow King) and the dream-realm of Carcosa, with the writers keeping it tasteful by avoiding open supernatural events and having the detectives deal with the material, non-supernatural mess the cult’s worship left behind, and the cult itself being one of possibly many ramifications and of how the existence of the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods reverberates into human society.

My idea is that the cult’s founders encountered something, possibly through psychedelic drugs or another altered state, that they barely understood, and then they built their beliefs around it, and later generations inherited a mixture of that experience, distorted explanations, rituals, and abuse. They encountered one small part of a much larger reality and made it the basis of everything they believed. In Call of Cthulhu, people receive impressions through dreams without understanding their source. Hypnos explores altered states and access to things beyond ordinary perception. A person can experience enough to become obsessed while still having almost no understanding of what happened. Of course, Chambers and Bierce created Hastur and Carcosa, and Lovecraft only name-dropped them in another book, so the link to the Mythos mostly comes through later writers like Derleth, but the point stands that Hastur exists as a lovecraftian entity within the mythos, which is what my theory is based on.

There's also a lot of philosophical and thematic ressonance between the show and cosmic horror, which is something a lot of people point out. Rust’s pessimism and some of the things LeDoux and Childress say fit comfortably into that existencial horror that the works of Lovecraft and other cosmic horror writers lean upon. The existence of the Old Ones and Outer Gods are powerful because it summons within the reader this melancholic thalassophobic feeling of powerlessness and nihilism in the face of uncaring entities within a dark amoral reality, not unlike the vibe I get when I watch the show. The antagonists in the show commit evils so intense and so hard to comprehend that their methods and values come across as almost alien, which echoes the way that the existence of the Old Ones and Outer Gods often are so unknowingly complex and evil that it breaks the human minds of those who glimpse it.

Finally, and this is kind of a minor point, but usually when a story is based on another medium, its world usually leaves that medium out of the world that story takes place. The MCU has no Marvel Comics company, no Stan Lee, no comic books about its heroes, etc. The characters in The Walking Dead never say the word “zombie” because zombie movies do not exist in their world, etc. Rust and Marty are capable, well-read investigators, and they never come across a copy of The King in Yellow or any Lovecraft story. If those books existed in their world, the detectives would at least have found a mention of them. Instead the show treats these ideas as completely unknown. Rust becomes obsessed with understanding them, and the detectives go to absurd lengths to piece them together from scratch. That only makes sense if the books do not exist in the show’s reality. I personally like to fill in that gap with the possibility that the events are happening in the same reality as those stories.

This is just my own headcanon, based on my personal taste in horror and what makes the story even more interesting to me, as a fan. I’m sharing it for the fun of discussing that possibility but obviously I'm making no claim about the writers’ actual intentions or the objective truth of the show.

I have a cold so I sat down alone to watch True Detective Season 1 for the first time.

I loved the show. The one thing that I got confused by was the link to a house being recently painted green and a green eared spaghetti monster.

All I could think was that maybe a painter carries a mop for some reason, maybe to clean walls of dust before painting. Maybe he puts a mop on his head and had green paint on his hands and put his palms up by his ears to scare the girl. It was the only part of the show where I just felt like the link was that tenuous. Was there a stronger link that I missed? Just not sure why anyone would investigate who painted a house decades ago.

It's from Brothers (2026).

Am I the only one who never saw him as much of an actor but wound up blown away with his performance in season three?

Ali talking to a suspect: how bout I put my foot up your ass

NPC: don't talk to me like that you evil black bastard

Ali: alright perhaps we got off on the wrong foot

Repeat 3x an episode

When I first watched it, I really only did it for the king in yellow. But after finishing s1, I’d say it’s one of the best seasons I’ve ever watched!!! After looking at reviews online it seems the other seasons are not that good. Like it seems NO ONE likes the other seasons. It can’t be that bad right?

They sat there, with looks on their faces like they’re trying to crack a safe, listening to the smartest man in the state drop knowledge on them. Those stupid ignorant fucks already prejudged and condemned this beautiful man. I guarantee they genuinely thought he was a lunatic and they might as well have been listening to a raving homeless man. They don’t deserve that collar.

I've watched season 1 about four times now, and have loved it every time. I've heard that the other seasons are pretty much one shitshow after another, which is why I didn't start season 2.

Until now, and I had to stop halfway through his monologue. This felt like one of those super long-winded sob stories that turns into a joke with a ludicrous punchline at the end. So I ask y'all, was anyone able to sit through this shit with a straight face? Because I don't think I could take it seriously even if I was paid to.

Just curious.

Woody Harrelson played the perfect A-hole cop to me and 100% was believable to me, like I legit felt he felt like a real cop, for better or worse. Am the I the only one that just wasn't a fan of McConaughey or his character in season one? Its hard to describe but there were scenes where I just felt his character wasn't real or wasn't buying what McConaughey was selling. In his defense, his character is definitely an oddball for sure, but I felt his character and acting was a little too inconsistent, whereas for Harrelson's character, he felt like the typical angry hypocritical cop that you 100% can see being a real life person.

If you disagree, that is 100% okay. I just always felt McConaughey's character was inconsistent sometimes. Still, the first season is an all-time great season/show, but its the one nitpick I have.