True Detective's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, recently gave his first one-on-one interview in four years and discussed, among many other things, whether the show's third season is based on real events or not.

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Speaking to EW, Pizzolatto was asked if the show's third season had any relation, as some had mentioned, to the West Memphis 3 "Satanic panic" case in which three eight-year old children were killed in a manner related to a Satanic ritual.Pizzolatto answered, simply, "Not at all. You're moved off that pretty quickly. It's really not informed by that."Pizzolatto continued to discuss how impressed he was with lead actor Mahershala Ali, who's character is going through early stages of dementia in his later years, and how this new story came to him "spontaneously and organically.""I was thinking about a couple people close to me who have been touched by this affliction [dementia] and I was wondering if it would be possible to tell a man’s life story in the form of a detective story," Pizzolatto said. "What if the detective’s ultimate mystery is: “Who am I?” And: “What did my life mean?” I didn’t know it would be a True Detective, I just had this idea."Some had been worried that Ali, since his character is suffering from dementia and we are dealing with earlier timelines, would be a unreliable narrator. Nic says this is not the case."If you’re seeing it, it’s reliable. I’m not playing those sorts of games with the audience, where you find out what you saw didn’t really happen, or it was a dream within a dream or something."As for what the future holds for True Detective, Pizzolatto says he already has an idea for a fourth season, and while it needs to "percolate for a while," it is "really, really wild."For more on True Detective, be sure to check out our review of the third season's first episode and how a certain Crooked Spiral connects this current season to the show's first season.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN who has highly recommends this season of True Detective. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst.