True Detective

Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic

The biggest problem facing the second series of True Detective is True Detective - the first series, which came billowing out of nowhere to become one of 2014's biggest, most brilliant TV phenomena.

There was alchemy at work there: the mix of no expectations; of a strikingly strange, inward tone from writer Nic Pizzolatto; of a single director, Cary Fukunaga, inspired by the challenge and possibilities to conjure an eight-hour movie that swamped you in swampy atmosphere; and, above all, of the three most important elements in filmed drama coming into alignment - casting, casting and casting.

The show not only offered Matthew McConaughey at the white-hot crest of his startling rebirth, roaming strange, deep-purple fields as black-hole existentialist cop Rust Cohle, but slammed him against the hard, fast, low genius of Woody Harrelson, wired, lazy and mad as his reluctant partner, Marty Hart. Watching them argue over pizza toppings would have been worthwhile. Together, they cut through, undercut and elevated writer Pizzolatto's consciously, ornately dark scripts.

Because they were so good, though, and because some people hated it the way some of us loved it, knives have been out for Pizzolatto's follow-up (which, shifting to a new story, new characters, and a new town filmed by new directors, retains only the True Detective brand and blanket-of-doom worldview) ever since it was announced its central pairing would be Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn.

Actually, Farrell, as Ray Velcoro, a boozed-up, burned-out bad-cop, produces the performance of his career. And the relationship to watch becomes not so much his with Vaughn - underplaying as Frank Semyon, the social-climbing gangster who keeps Ray in his pocket - as that between Ray and grudging new partner Ani Bezzerides, a detective from a neighbouring jurisdiction with her own barrelful of issues, terrifically played by Rachel McAdams.

Good as they all are (Taylor Kitsch, as the third cop in the mix, a suicidal CHiPs guy carrying scars from Iraq, is an unsettlingly blank knot of tension), however, they have their work cut out lifting Pizzolatto's heavy vibes and heightened, blunted noir language.

It could partly be the setting. From last year's gothic bayous, we're now in the familiar TV-land environs of LA, and, while you almost feel it in obsessive overhead shots of the tangling freeways and end-of-the-world coastline, the show doesn't quite capture the occult strangeness pregnant in the landscape.

At times, it feels like watching an odd episode of CSI, where no one can crack a smile or else a bomb will go off.

As Pizzolatto trowels on his weird black stuff, it can get too much, too slowly: Vaughn's opening monologue in episode two, for example, about being locked in a dark cellar as a six-year-old, beating rats to death with his bare little hands. It says a lot that Leonard Cohen, providing the ominous new theme song, sounds like he's having more fun than anyone in the programme.

On the other hand, there is a juicy, itchy cohort of outer-limits actors, including Lolita Davidovich, David Morse and a ghostly turn from the mighty Fred Ward. The plot, a stew of public and private secrets and crimes involving murder, land and lingering traces of LA's 1970s flakiness, is ambitious, like James Ellroy and David Mamet trying to crank out a depleted, polluted modern echo of Chinatown, shorn of elegance. When it's not trying to be weird, the ambience is weird. By episode three, it begins to coalesce. Forget you're watching True Detective, and True Detective grows worth watching.