Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

In the summer of 2010, I had decided to get into film and TV writing, so I wrote scripts for six different ideas I had developed, and the pilot for True Detective was one of them.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

I find the constraints of drama actually freeing: It brings everything down to character and action.

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Killing characters on television has become an easy short cut to cathartic emotion.