TRUE DETECTIVE (BUT ONLY SEASON 1, 2014)

With great respect to Mahershala Ali, and, uh, some respect to Colin Farrell – What happened to your shoes?! – the spirit of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective was functionally exhausted by the end of its first run. The time-hopping first season first exhibited enormous promise as two versions of Woody Harrelson’s dopey, aggressive detective Marty Hart and his harddrinking partner Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, raced to solve a string of murders along the Louisiana coast over the course of two decades.

By the end of the penultimate episode, True Detective had reached a harried pitch, with the murderous villain’s identity finally revealed. Yet it had also become steeped in casual misogyny and plot devices that felt increasingly unimaginative; after seven episodes revelling far too much in the killing of women, it turned out the show’s Yellow King had been there all along, but his scars had been covered up with ... a beard. The finale presented viewers with neither a happy nor unhappy ending: the good guys unexpectedly survived, but the powerful people who enabled the Yellow King’s murderousness may or may not have remained at large.

After exhausting so much energy whipping up a massively engaging mythology, True Detective couldn’t stick the landing. Each season since has felt like a heavyhanded course correction. Issa López, Jodie Foster and Kali Reis may rescue the anthology series when they lead the fourth season later this year, in part because Pizzolatto’s role is significantly diminished.