*SPOILERS AHEAD*

I know I’m gonna offend people with this, so I’ll get it out of the way right off the bat: “True Detective” isn’t the greatest thing ever in the history of ever … not yet anyway.

But the hype around the ‘Net would certainly have you believe that it is simply the greatest work humankind has ever produced, and if you’ve already seen it, maybe you feel this way. If so, good for you, it’s a pretty good show, I’ll give it that, and you’re entitled to your opinion anyway. But the calls for “GREATEST SHOW EVAR” seem to be off base in my opinion.

I have to admit, I bought into that hype before I watched the eight-hour first season of Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Fukunaga’s HBO show. Admittedly, it could just be the contrarian in me, but when I finally did get to see it, I was kind of let down. I thought there were interesting things about it. The cast is off the charts for a TV show. Getting Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson must either be seen as something of a coup, or a true, amazing sign of where TV is headed. In particular, McConaughey’s Rust Cohle is one of the most dark and intriguing characters you’ll ever come across. The rest of the cast list is pretty impressive too, with a mix of familiar faces and unknowns who certainly have the talent to support the leads.

The production values are very high as well. It’s basically a long Hollywood film split into bite-size parts. As I’ve written before, this is where I’d like to see the realm of entertainment go. Movies are great, but stories can be better told in the TV format if people with money are willing to invest in it. Tural Louisiana in the mid-90s is a powerful, creepy setting, which lends itself well to a cop noir, which is a style “True Detective” delves into often. And anytime something is able to rope in an older work like the 120-year-old book of short stories, “The King in Yellow,” by Robert W. Chambers is a win in my book.

Side note: Since people have learned about that tie-in, lots of people have cracked open that book, only to find that it’s written like a book that’s more than a century old and not filled with all kinds of cool, bizarre monsters and shit. Instead it’s this slow, psychological stuff about people dying in their insanity. It’s pretty funny to read people’s comments on Amazon.com saying, “Sooo, this wasn’t what I was expecting,” as if they thought Chambers had pre-written “True Detective” over a century ago. That’s what you get, Pizzolatto, for trying to make really old stuff seem cool. Certainly, using that book as a backdrop adds another layer to the show that is very different from anything else out there.

But that’s where my unmitigated praise ends. There are a lot of elements in this show with plenty of potential, but as of the end of this season, most of it goes unfulfilled.

Although Harrelson does good work as Rust’s fellow detective, Marty Hart, the character himself is hardly anything new. He’s your basic good, Christian family man, or at least that’s the performance he puts on in his public life. In his private life, he’s the patriarchal man-of-the-house, he cheats on his wife with younger ladies, and he acts like his family is some sort of entitlement who owes him for all that he’s “given” them. It is interesting to see how this type of character interacts with Rust, but it’s nothing too original.

At first, Marty’s arc seems like it could be an interesting deconstruction of suburban U.S. masculinity. It starts out that way. But by the end of the eight episodes, none of the women he’s playing off of are given anymore development than the general archetypes you see so often in Hollywood. There’s the “nagging” wife who wants to do what’s best for the family. And then there’s the couple of “crazy” girlfriends. If the show had gone farther in exploring how Marty’s belief system about himself and his world affects the people around him, then the lack of substance in the women might have been a little more forgivable. But in the later episodes, this part of the narrative is skimped because it wasn’t really that high on the list of priorities for the creators. So it doesn’t really add up to anything. Michelle Moynahan plays Marty’s wife, and she does her best with what she’s given, but there are some things you just can’t save no matter how hard you try. Eventually, Rust chalks Marty’s troubles up to going after “the crazy ones.” Maybe the viewer is supposed to dislike both of the main characters, but “bitches be crazy” seems like a rather stupid point to make in what’s meant to be a “serious and intellectually stimulating” sort of show.

The method of telling the story is great, because it allows the audience to see the characters grow over a long period of time, and the way the story is told itself is exposition on the characters. It’s a very appreciable unique approach that makes the show fun to watch. But the cops interviewing the two detectives about their past seem like they might have interesting stories themselves, but unfortunately the viewer won’t ever know about those because they aren’t there.

A lot is made of the big tracking shot part in episode 4. It is very cool to watch, but the portion of the story it’s used on is so tangential to the main story that the tremendous effort put into it kind of feels wasted. It’s a neat idea, but it might have been more useful given a tighter script.

The exposition about the killer in the whodunit? case is really interesting and creepy, and it seems like it’s leading up to something big, and shocking. But in the end, he ends up being a pretty common gross backwoods cliche you see in a lot of cop shows. It’s disappointing to see all that stuff you were pondering earlier on in the series that made you want to know what the hell’s going on, all go out the window in favor of a standard chase and fight scene. Since the killer’s identity was hidden for most of the show, you’re not really given enough about him, other than being a stereotype, so what appeared to be clever storytelling, now feels rushed and underdeveloped. As a result, instead of the epic finish we believed we were being promised, we got something kinda bland.

In the end, it just seems like all of this should have added up to a lot more than it actually did. There’s no question, there was some great talent involved in this production, and like it or not, Pizzolatto and Fukunaga told the story they wanted to tell. It seemed like a couple more episodes might have benefitted the pacing a bit, especially toward the end. Whether that choice was made by HBO or the show’s creators, we don’t really know.

If you look at this more of as a movie than a TV show, I think that improves it a bit. It works well as an eight-hour movie. As a weekly show, I could see being frustrated with the early episodes, but in the middle, it really starts to pick up and makes you want to see what happens next. Most HBO dramas have this quality, though in “True Detective’s” case, it’s for slightly different reasons. This is a much more compact show than other HBO dramas that have several seasons to sprawl out. The nature of this show, with each season being self-contained, made the early episodes challenging for different reasons. But season two does have a ton of potential, especially if it manages to build off of season one in some way.

I wouldn’t call this the greatest thing ever. It’s a really good movie or a really good show, depending on how you look at it. It’s probably the first one I would watch again, though there are plenty of other shows I say I’d be interested in watching a second time. But eight hours would be much easier to get through a second time than 70 hours.

I would still put “Breaking Bad” or “The Wire” over this, as both were much more original and substantive. They’re also much more of an investment, and although that means they take up a lot more of your time to watch, they’re also much more rewarding. No, they don’t feature big Hollywood stars. People only knew Bryan Cranston as Hal from “Malcolm in the Middle” before he started cooking meth. Idris Elba is great, and he has a major role in “The Wire,” but he’s not must-see for most people. The production of those shows isn’t of quite the cinematic quality as “True Detective.” But the writing and story and characters of those shows are so complex and strong that they more than hold their own. I’m sure those aren’t the only shows in that league.

Don’t get wrong, “True Detective” is excellent entertainment. It’s very fun to watch. There are a lot of good things here, and the Chambers theme just raises it another notch, especially for geeky people who are into that sort of stuff. Is it a must-see? Maybe. There’s a good chance you’ll see it and think I’m full of shit, and I accept that possibility. As long as you avoid buying into the hype, you probably won’t be disappointed. It’s ridiculous that something can be ONLY a really good show, and be a let down because it doesn’t happen to be the greatest thing ever.

But that’s the way hype works, isn’t it?