The air is thick with philosophical dread in HBO’s curious new murder-mystery drama, True Detective, a miniseries event that brings the big-screen talents of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey to the long-form landscape of prestige television. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and written by the novelist Nic Pizzolatto, this eight-part drama is concerned with bigger, deeper things than simply whodunit. Speaking in the same language of Southern creep and decay as True Blood, only at a much lower pitch, True Detective’s aims are unabashedly, floridly existential. And while it occasionally trips up on its own wordy moral pondering, it nonetheless represents a captivating and offbeat tweak of a well-worn genre.

Then again, “tweak” might be too gentle a word. Fukunaga, a young director who’s probably best known for his elegantly moody adaptation of Jane Eyre, has chosen a portentous, heavy palette to match Pizzolatto’s writing, which takes the standard mismatched (so, really, well-matched) detectives and elevates their banter to theology-seminar theorizing. Is True Detective about solving a murder? Only sort of. The murder in question is that of a young woman found in a barren patch of Louisiana countryside, her body, which shows evidence of torture, posed in a prayerful kneeling position, a pagan-looking crown of sticks and deer antlers placed on her head. Surrounding the body are little Blair Witch-y stick formations, later explained to be talismans meant to ward off the devil. So something unsettling and religiously tinged is happening here, and it’s up to these two troubled detectives to crack the case.

McConaughey plays Rust Cohle, while Harrelson is Martin Hart, and if you can’t guess from those on-the-nose names which one is the ragged loner with a streak of nihilism in him and which is the floundering but ultimately well-intentioned family man, then this might not be the series for you. Using a framing device that has both detectives reaching back 17 years to remember a murder investigation from 1995, True Detective plays with two warring ideologies. Cohle immediately sees the killer’s predatory angst, and is soon running off on three-dollar-word-laden soliloquies about the meaninglessness of existence and the futilities of faith. Hart, on the other hand, still believes in simple good and evil and, though he’s something of a drunken philanderer, values family and tradition and all the good old cozy stuff that Cohle, grieving the loss of a young daughter, finds useless and deluding. While they chew over these quandaries, chatty digressions that are alternately stimulating and tiring, they’re plunged into a murder investigation that takes us on a tour of a poor and ravaged land, a place always precariously poised between hurricanes, its religious conviction curdling into something resembling cult-like hysteria.

It’s fascinating terrain to explore, and luckily neither Pizzolatto nor Fukunaga condescend to these twangy, hardscrabble people the way True Blood often does. It’s a mysterious place full of strange things, but everyone who lives there is deeply human, with their own stories and regrets and, flickering dimly in the corners of their eyes, hopes, too. McConaughey and Harrelson tuck into the big meals served to them with relish, McConaughey in particular maintaining a transfixing, ghostly focus even when his long monologues reach their most turgid. The show is definitely overwritten in parts, but when it settles back down into its slightly elevated patois and the mechanics of the core mystery start creaking along again, it’s as quietly engaging as any other detective game on TV in recent years.

I’ve seen four episodes so far, the middle two being the strongest. The first episode, which introduces the framing device and gives us a jumbled timeline, is a little disorienting and lays on the discursive tone a bit too heavily. The fourth episode, meanwhile, lurches awkwardly into an undercover action story, one that plays like a Michael Mann scene, had that master of nighttime happenings maybe taken a few pulls of hooch before calling, “Action.” It’s an arresting sequence, but it takes us too far away from the denser, more contemplative stuff that makes this show so strange and interesting. Episodes two and three, though, bubble over with peculiar moments of introspection and vivid depictions of wounded souls stuck in the hazy, fruitless limbo that is life. (That’s how Cohle might put it, though maybe limbo is even too hopeful a concept for his taste.) Though the show can at times become a little too fond of its own ambition, it’s hard not to appreciate the ballsiness it takes to hook us in with these big-name stars and a shocking occult murder mystery only to then sit us down for a brooding lecture about the nature of man.

Which hopefully doesn’t make the series sound like some pseudo-intellectual slog. The writing is sharp and clever more often than not, and the investigation does pull us along at a reasonable clip. The framing device adds another juicy layer of mystery, as we want to know not only who did this heinous deed in 1995 but also what happened to our two cops—one a mess, the other seemingly still keeping it together—in the nearly two decades since. I’m definitely hooked, by both the grisly murder and the bleak expounding on the human condition. It’s a weird mix, but these actors and the show’s richly realized sense of place turn that oddity into something compelling, vital even. While at times the show is simply, even clumsily, playing armchair philosopher, dressing Nietzsche and others in down-home clothes, there’s a slyness and a dark charm that sell it. True Detective is an earnest show without being innocent—it’s taken stock of the world, found it broken or lacking, and offered those findings to us in swampy mystery form. That’s certainly far more engaging than any of my philosophy classes ever were.