True Detective season three has returned to positive reviews by evoking the eerie, gothic vibe and taut atmosphere of the show's first season – complete with a similar, sinister scrubland landscape in a southern state.
The series follows Mahershala Ali's Detective Wayne Hays and Stephen Dorff's Detective Roland West, as they investigate the disappearance of two children in Arkansas. The story is set over three decades, as the unsolved cast has haunted Hays for thirty years.
Dorff has described this season as show-runner Nic Pizzolatto's "most ambitious" yet due to it flitting from the 1980s, and the 1990s to 2015, with a wizened Wayne Hays, who now has Alzheimer's, piecing the case together for a crime documentary.
It's also "running a little long", according to the Somewhere star, and although he says HBO wants to edit it slightly for time, creator Pizzolatto doesn't want anything to be taken out.
"I just want everything to remain in the series because I know it's running a little long right now, and they're [HBO] trying to cut a little out, and I know that Nic doesn't want to," Dorff told Digital Spy.
"So there's something going on there... But I'm hoping it all works out because you want all of your work to make it in the piece."
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Dorff also spoke about how Pizzolatto rewrote his and Ali's roles after the Oscar-winning Moonlight star persuaded the creator to cast him as the lead, rather than in a supporting role.
According to Variety, Pizzolatto envisioned the third season's protagonist as a white guy, before Ali cleverly intervened via a number of text messages consisting of photos of his own grandfather – a uniformed police officer.
"Mahershala, after he won the Oscar this was something he really wanted – true story – and he's managed by the same entertainment company which produced the first one, and it represents Nic as well, and I think they had an early meeting and he loved the material," said Dorff.
"Nic had to change and flip the parts [of Wayne and Roland], I think he had to go back in and do some work and figure to that out.
"In the end Nic liked it even better and thought it was less of an obvious choice, and gave the piece even more of a special thing, and so Mahershala was cast first, and it was built around him when HBO greenlit the third season. And then me and Carmen Ejogo came on board. So I never read Roland as Wayne, or vice versa."
Dorff also disclosed that Pizzolatto fantasises about bringing back original characters from the other series, including Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle, for a special series in the future.
"Nic always said he'd like to do something one day where he gets to bring back all of the characters, like Rust Cohle [Matthew McConaughey]," the actor told Esquire.co.uk.
"And so you don't know what that would be. I would never turn it down! It [the idea] is all in that crazy brain of Nic's.
"All I know is I'd love to work with Nic again, and I told him he should direct because all these directors are doing his novels and making movies... I'd like to see him get behind the camera to direct some of his other material."
True Detective season 3 airs on Sundays at 9pm on HBO in the US, and on Sky Atlantic in the UK. The first two episodes of True Detective season 3 are also available now on streaming service NOW TV, with a new episode released every Monday and on demand.
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Naomi Gordon is news writer mainly covering entertainment news with a focus on celebrity interviews and television.
