If you watched television at all this past year, then you probably ehard about the success of True Detective on HBO and if you watched the series then you know just how amazing it was first hand. The show not only saw the resurgence of Matthew McConaughey as a respectable and talented actor, but it has helped usher in the era of the television miniseries.
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Miniseries have been around for ages but it seems that there is now an official timeline that we can follow — B.T.D (Before True Detective) and A.T.D. (After True Detective).
In the era before True Detective, we had miniseries but they weren’t really the major events they should have been. There are notable exceptions to this as Lonesome Dove and ROOTS were landmark television events that were widely watched by a mass audience. But things have changed over the years and the miniseries seemed to have died off.
What True Detective did to help revolutionize the miniseries is in the way they cast the show. Like Lonesome Dove before it, True Detective took well established Hollywood stars and thrust them into a small screen role that felt so much larger than it should have been. True Detective was really an evolution of Lonesome Dove in that way, as it was made so much larger than life thanks tot he major performances it packed from A-list stars.
This has, spawned a renaissance of the miniseries as we are now seeing shows like Fargo, American Horror Story (which admittedly came first) and others now unafraid to go the miniseries route. It’s hard to say that True Detective inspired this resurgence of the miniseries but it without a doubt gave us all confidence that it can be a fruitful era of television.