WCXX

If you were new to True Detective (Sky Atlantic), the high-budget Deep South gloom-fest from HBO, the first thing you'll have noticed is Woody Harrelson's chin. Middle-period Harrelson is defined by his chin; it seems to have a screen presence of its own, dominating scenes, pushing the rest of Woody into the background. If True Detective is a critical hit, Woody Harrelson's chin should get the Best Actor Emmy.

It doesn't really deserve to be a critical hit, though. Not least because it wants so desperately to be one. Every scene has a neon sign over it saying "THIS IS ATMOSPHERIC": prostitutes murdered in strange, pseudo-Satanic rituals; alcoholic, philandering, drug-addicted cops who've spent time in psychiatric hospitals and have a tragic backstory; police brutality and corruption; adorable 10-year-old girls who are probably going to be exposed in short order to the horrors of the world. The makers went for an American Gothic feel, which means drawling Louisiana accents and bleak landscapes. And they have decided that you can't build atmosphere and develop plot at the same time, so it felt a million years long.

The thing is, it was atmospheric. You can't hurl that much atmosphere at something without some of it sticking, and Chinny Harrelson and the almost unrecognisable Matthew McConaughey were excellent as the unhappy men in the patrol car. Some of the writing, if a bit heavy-handed and self-consciously portentous, was great too ("The hubris it must take," growled McConaughey's Rust Cohle on the subject of parenthood, "bringing a soul out of non-existence into this meat".).

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The second episode, Seeing Things, had the pair of them getting closer to finding out why someone had murdered a woman and put antlers on her corpse, visiting a brothel where the victim had worked. It also showed more than a glimpse of Cohle's potential for violence. But it feels manipulative, and the achingly slow plot hasn't done enough to grip me to come back for the third episode.

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