By The lead police officer in the third season of HBO's crime drama series True Detective was originally written as a white character - until Mahershala Ali sent show-runner Nic Pizzolatto images of his own family members in sixties and seventies Arkansas to make the point that black men occupied senior roles in the force in that era too.
Pizzolatto took the hint, meaning Ali - who in 2017 won a 'Best Supporting Actor' Oscar for his role in Moonlight, and looks well placed for another nomination for his forthcoming film Green Book - moved the season in a new direction before filming had even begun.
A new direction was desperately needed. The much-anticipated second season, starring Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams and Vince Vaughn, was a wild misstep that bordered at times on self-parody, leaving fans afraid the dark and compulsive energy from the first season was lost forever.
Against the odds, season three proves those fear were misplaced.
The story begins in 1980 when detective partners Wayne Hays (Ali) and Roland West (Stephen Dorff) are called out to investigate two missing children in Arkansas. They arrive at the downcast home of Tom Purcell (Scoot McNairy) and his wife Lucy (Mamie Gummer), whose children Will and Julie cycled off to play and did not return.
The action then shifts to an older detective Hays recalling that day when the case is reopened a decade later, in 2015. Now greying and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, he tries to piece together the past for a television show called, amusingly, True Criminal.
Ali’s performance is sensational, creating three, emotionally varied points in a man's life – and joining the dots between them – with subtlety and charisma. Hays is every bit as compelling as McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, but with the added intrigue of being an unreliable narrator thanks to his deteriorating powers of recall.
The plot is, once again, brilliantly tight and tense; the three time periods expertly woven together with the same clever dance between reveals that made season one such assured television, while visually the landscapes of the Ozark region is evoked with the same dark brilliance as the abandoned buildings and woodlands of Louisiana that scared the bejesus out of Woody Harrelson in 2014.
Speak to Esquire about the show last October, Ali said: "I kid you not, the finale episode is the best piece of television I’ve ever read in my life." While we’ve only been able to see half the season so far, it’s enough to suggest you shouldn’t doubt him. The first great surprise of television in 2019 is that True Detective is back, and as good as it's ever been.
'True Detective 3' begins on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV on 13 January
