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Now that we've got enough distance from it, maybe we can see the first season of True Detective for what it really was—and please understand that I say this with as much awe and affection as I can muster: it was trash shined up like gold. It was lurid, pulpy and perverse, completely ridiculous and borderline reprehensible, but it was dressed up in the classy couture of A-list acting talent, bravura visual style, and just enough writerly writer-ing to allow us to ignore what pop-nihilist nonsense it all was. It was one of those rare cultural phenomenon where its critics could rattle off all of its sins, and its ardent fans (like me) would cry out, "Yes! Exactly!" Good God, it was awesome. But was it art? Oy. Let's not get carried away.

Which brings us to season two, and its batshit premiere episode—dead bodies, Internet porn, drugs, drinking, corruption, beatings, brass knuckles, and charming bon mots like, "I'll butt-fuck your father on this lawn with your mother's headless corpse," all in the first hour—and which should chase away any lingering doubt about what True Detective ever was, and clearly still is. It's still trash shined up like gold. The trash is a bit trashier this time, and the gold a bit less shiny, but the theory still abides.

Much has been made about the departure of the first season's director, Cary Fukunaga, who reportedly clashed with True Detective's writer, creator, and expert self-mythologizer, Nic Pizzolatto; the expectation appears to be that Fukunaga's exit will bring the show crashing back to Earth in season two, that Pizzolatto supplied the mumbo-jumbo and that Fukunaga was responsible for everything that was, you know, good. Nonsense. Two things are clear from the season-two premiere: One, Fukunaga will be missed—his replacement, Fast & Furious franchise veteran Justin Lin, has done a credible job preserving the show's signature gloom and noir-ish palette, but he's got a much heavier hand and much less patience for letting dread build slowly; and two, this is Pizzolatto's show, to the bone. This is his vision—the macro theme of season two seems to be, once again, all the evil that powerful white men do—and these are his words.

(And by the way, can I make a brief case that Pizzolatto's words are underrated? Yes, I think we could've all done with one fewer monologue from Matthew McConaughey about flat circles and the nature of man… But I also laughed out loud during a second-episode car conversation between Colin Farrell and e-cig-smoking Rachel McAdams, in which Farrell says that e-cigs creep him out because he can't avoid the feeling that "they're smoking me" and it's just too close to "sucking a robot's dick.")