HBO’s All-Time Greatest Detective Series Was Originally Meant To Be a Book Sequel

With four seasons of True Detective in the bag and a fifth on the way, it’s crazy to think the show wasn't even supposed to be an anthology series at all — at least, not the way we know it to be. Creator Nic Pizzolatto originally imagined the story as a literary follow-up to his 2010 crime novel Galveston, with the pitch being to continue exploring the morally gray world he had already built on the page. That idea ultimately never materialized, but traces of it remain woven throughout what became one of HBO's defining original dramas.