In 1928, the detective novelist, S.S. Van Dine published “Twenty rules for writing detective stories” in The American magazine. The First Commandment reads

The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

Detective fiction invites readers to work alongside or, if you’re really good, ahead of the detective to solve the crime. If the author does not play fair, the reader cannot play the game. The challenge for the writer is to provide clues tantalizing enough to sustain readers’ desires for answers, but challenging enough to foil their efforts to find them.

On this count, Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Joji Fukunaga, the creator and director of HBO’s True Detective, have succeeded marvelously. The show has sparked more speculation about how it will all turn out than any program since Lost. There are now so may recaps and conversations going on about the program on Reddit and other forums that this week Vulture produced a recap of the recaps. From tracking down source material in 19th-century “weird fiction” to locating creepy pictures of Courir de Mardi Gras, fans and critics of the show have become detectives as obsessive as Rust Cohle, scouring screenshots of the show for the clues that will solve the crime. They were egged on to investigate from the start by Detective Marty Hart’s invocation of the detective’s curse: “Solution was right under my nose, but I was paying attention to the wrong clues.”

It is no small matter that what empowers these obsessive fan investigations is digital video technology. DVDs, DVR, and screen-capturing technology allow us to watch television shows as closely and carefully as we might a book. Lost coincided with the rise of DVR (it took until 2008 to be in 25 perecent of U.S. homes) and became one of the first shows subjected to such intense examination using digital technologies. Fans created websites dedicated to nothing but posting and decoding screen captures of the program in order to unlock its many mysteries. During the run-up to the conclusion of Breaking Bad, viewers used screen caps to discover color schemes, callbacks to earlier seasons, and hints about the finale.

But Pizzolatto and Fukunaga have made the first true cop show of the digital age, or rather, the first cop show to reckon with and exploit the effects of digitization. True Detective has provided us with so many clues that the creators are daring us to think any aspect of the show is irrelevant. Is it merely a coincidence that the show’s initial crime takes place in 1995, the very year that the DVD was invented, and that Cohle and Martin missed their target then?

Fans of Murder She Wrote, Matlock, and even Law & Order typically got to revisit an episode only when it re-aired. There was no going back to re-investigate clues or confirm that the plot had played fairly with the audience.

Neither was there much need. As a good friend pointed out to me, those 48-minute shows could not accommodate the accretion of details and clues that True Detective can maintain over eight episodes. Playing out over a short, stand-alone season and written entirely by Pizzolatto before filming, True Detective can promise viewers a tighter narrative than any show written over many years in a writer’s room. But the show also challenges the audience’s memory in ways that older detective shows couldn’t. Pizzolato has claimed that “if someone watches the first episode and really listens, it tells you 85 percent of the story of the first six episodes.” But who can really listen and watch that well?