True Detective (2014)

Water is wet and the first season of True Detective is the best. Some constants in the world that cannot be denied yet everyone's obsession with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's run means that the rest of the show is often overlooked. Ok, maybe season two is worth a skip, but Mahershala Ali is predictably great in the third season and Jodie Foster mothers like usual in the unfairly maligned fourth outing. This is grisly, A-list fronted detective fare with a smidge of cosmic horror thrown in for good measure. If that doesn't excite you, have you considered that TV might not be for you?

For my money, there's no better single season of TV than True Detective Season 1. What Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson did there, and the story crafted by Nic Pizzolatto, was like capturing lighting in a bottle. Subsequent seasons have struggled to match those electrifying highs, but it has to be said, if it weren’t for the True Detective tag, we’d probably be heralding seasons 2-4 as brilliant in their own right. From gritty street-level crime to mysterious kidnappings and arctic ghost stories, True Detective is continually looking to evolve and expand, and that should be appluaded.