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Spoiler alert: From Rachel McAdams' weapons fetish to Colin Farrell's moustache… 8 fantastic things about the season two premiere of True Detective, by JIM SHELLEY

Published: 21:44 EST, 21 June 2015 | Updated: 06:39 EST, 22 June 2015

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There’s only one thing harder than creating an award winning, cool, cult TV show as sensationally intelligent, inventive, or innovative as True Detective - following it up.

Frankly, writer Nic Pizzolatto never stood a chance.

The premiere of his much-anticipated sequel (shown on HBO on Sunday night and on Sky Atlantic at 9pm on Monday) was such a slow-burner and such a departure you could almost feel the sighs of disappointment from even the first series’ most fervent fans.

That was all the thanks he got for producing a crime thriller credited with changing the genre of the cop show and the most dazzling, cinematic combination of mystery and menace on television since Twin Peaks.

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Be afraid, be very afraid: LA County cops Rachel McAdam and Colin Farrell starred in the much-anticipated second season of True Detective, a show that redefined the genre of TV cop shows

The first episode of Pizzolatto’s follow-up didn’t take long to solve the biggest mystery about the long-awaited sequel – the question that press and public had been asking for 15 months virtually from the minute the first finale finished: how do you do it again?

Answer? You don’t. You can’t.

Like series one, the second season/storyline had to be completely different.

Pizzolatto had said all along that each series would be based on the ground breaking format for a cop drama of having new cops and even a totally new location. Predictably, he was true to his word.

The brilliantly original odd couple cops at the heart of the first story - Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart (played with splendid bravado by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harelson) - were gone and the action no longer set in the vast, ungovernable, outback of Louisiana.

Any unsettled, unsettling, issues about the Dora Lange case, the sinister cult of ‘The Yellow King’ and ‘Carcosa’ will remain unsolved or unexplained.

Pizzolatto had moved on and so must we.

The first series was so uniquely, outlandishly, brilliant that the follow-up was always bound to be an anti-climax initially.

Directors such as David Lynch, David Simon, and Roman Polanski could have told him that. However impressive their follow-ups to Twin Peaks, The Wire, and Chinatown may have been, the thing that people and history remember is that their successors weren’t as good as the originals.

The fact that True Detective 2 had elements of all of these though supports the view that it was still pretty great and support Pizzolatto and trust his vision – if only more because of what he delivered in the first series than what we saw in this premiere.

Here are eight of the main reasons why.

1.The plot

Although there were themes and plot devices reminiscent of the first series they were more subtle (mostly), as if Pizzolatto had responded to suggestions that TD1 was over-written, over-acted, over angst-ridden, and generally over-the-top.

Whereas Rust rambled about his nihilistic existentialist philosophies so incessantly that even his partner begged him to stop, here only one scene saw Pizzolatto indulge in flaunting his reading list, with a brief mention of Ginsberg. This time though,the hippy guru (David Morse in an alarming silver-haired wig) told his group: ‘Today’s exercise is to recognise this world as meaningless and that God did not create a meaningless world...This is how we must live now. In the final age of man.’

Very 'True Detective' territory but the opposite of Rust's view that nothing had any meaning.

The storylines about the clandestine activities/influences cult, a theatrically staged corpse, and a missing woman were all familiar from series one, as was the predominance of characters vulnerable at any time to the propensity for terrible, savage, violence or plagued by nihilism, alcoholism, sexual fetishes, and torment over absent children.

But mostly Pizzolatto had moved from the shocking ritual abuse and killing in 1990s Louisiana to the corruption permeating the local business, police, and politics in modern-day California.

A newspaper investigation promised to expose the pollution, illegal labour practices, and bribery in the city of Vinci threatening the prospects of a consortium planning on profiting from the construction of a high-speed rail link across LA County.

Latest True Detective trailer gives more clues for new season

True Detective 2 looks likely to be the series to revive Colin Farrell's status as a Hollywood star in much the same way the first did with Matthew McConaughey. His moustache is so great it has its own mention on the credits and should have its own trailer

The surface of the story may be new but the mood of menace and underlying tension was always there.

Murder inevitably followed when the body of a pivotal player in the plan was found, positioned as if staring across the site, his eyes burnt out with acid.

The intricacies of the plot evoke the complex crime novels of James Ellroy, Polanski’s Chinatown films, and 70s conspiracies such as Paul Newman’s The Drowning Pool and Warren Beatty’s The Parallax View.

‘This place is built on a co-dependency of interest,’ one businessman/gangster said.

The main premise of this season, it was clear, was that the financial and moral corruption was all-pervasive. As his wife reminded those attending the consortium’s pitch (and the audience at home): ‘Everybody gets touched.’

2. Colin Farrell

True Detective 2 already looks likely to be the series to revive Colin Farrell’s status as a huge Hollywood star, just as TD1 did with Matthew McConaughey.

The first episode showed three actors’ detectives and Vince Vaughn’s career criminal vying to take up Rust Cohle’s mantle as the most screwed-up individual on display. But Colin Farrell definitely hit the front as Ray Velcoro, an emotionally shattered shell of a man consumed by drunken rage and (self) hate.

Unlike the first series, one rare flashback showed the root of Ray’s overt corruption – when he allowed a local gangster to ‘take care of’ an amphetamine freak that had raped Velcoro’s wife and in all likelihood fathered the boy Velcoro had raised as his son.

Before Vinci PD, Velcoro spend eight years with the LA Sheriff’s department.

‘Anything there going to hurt you?’ asked the lawyer arguing his case for custody.

‘No. I welcome judgment,’ Ray said – which in True Detective doesn’t actually mean there isn’t. (On the contrary.)

We can only wonder what Velcoro might be capable of towards more venal recipients having witnessed the violence he meted out to a journalist and the father of his son’s schoolmate having first donned a balaclava and knuckle-duster respectively. His appetite for smoking, drinking, and self-destruction promises to match Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant and Harrelson in Rampart.

As for the scene where Velcoro threatened his own son to tell him who had been bullying him, drunkenly demanding ‘Give me his name right now or I’ll pull down your pants and spank you in front of the cheerleading squad’ and deriding him as ‘a fat p***y’, it was so powerful it became hard to watch.

3. Colin Farrell’s moustache

As good as Colin Farrell’s acting, Nic Pizzolatto’s dialogue, and the photography may have been, the thing that we’ll all remember from this episode and probably the whole series will probably be Colin Farrell’s moustache. A magnificent handlebar that somehow captured the innate misery of the man wearing it, Farrell’s moustache was perfectly realistic but so extreme it was cartoonish – combining the demeanour of Droopy and the macho ferocity of Yosemite Sam.

Rachel McAdams' Ani drinks heavily and has an array of implements in her bedroom, a miniature arsenal of weapons concealed about her person, and a plethora of psychological issues about sex

First look at True Detective season 2 on HBO

4. Rachel McAdams

The performances of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were so extraordinarily charismatic, one criticism of the first True Detective was that it was too male – so much so that there were rumours that the two cops in the follow-up would both be women.

Now that the final scene has brought them together, it looks likely that Colin Farrell’s Velcoro will be partnered up with Rachel McAdams’ kickass detective Antigone ‘Ani’ Bezzerides.

Judging by Ani's heavy drinking, the array of implements in her bedroom, the miniature arsenal of weapons she wears concealed about her person, and the plethora of psychological issues she has about sex, her sister being a webcam ‘performer’ and her father’s work as the cult guru, she will certainly give Ray a run for his money.

5. Vince Vaughn

Compared to the more volatile, fraught, exertions of Farrell and McAdams, so far Vince Vaughn’s brooding portrayal of gangster-turned-casino owner-construction consortium developer Frank Semyon was impressively (mercifully) contained. Admittedly, this might not last long.

He also provided the only line with anything like the barbed humour that Marty used to aim at Cohle.

‘We don’t want to look hungry,’ he warned one associate, suggesting they met an important investor at the airport. ‘Don’t ever do anything out of hunger. Not even eating.’

6. The supporting cast

The glamour factor of season two had definitely been upped with a range of hot actresses, led by our own Kelly Reilly who started her cop drama career as a detective in Lynda La Plante’s ‘Above Suspicion’ and has now graduated to Vince Vaughn’s wife.

The third policeman in the piece was Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a motorcycle cop whose demons drove him (literally) into semi-suicidal high speed rides that were part Ryan Gosling in ‘Drive’, part ‘ChiPs’, but showed why ‘The Fast & Furious’ director Justin Lin had replaced the more poetic photography of Cary Fukunaga.

Vince Vaughn has a quietly menacing presence as gangster-turned-casino owner-construction consortium developer Frank Semyon

7. The location

‘What the f**k is Vinci?’ a local cop asked when Farrell arrived at the murder scene introducing himself as ‘Ray Velcoro, Vinci PD.’

‘A city – supposedly,’ Velcoro growled, a rare in-joke in a much dryer, less flamboyant opener.

The location of the fictitious West coast city couldn’t be more unlike the Louisiana but the stunning overhead shots of the enormous industrial plant and the sprawling Californian freeways were classic ‘True Detective.’

8. The music

As with the first season, the mood and the messages of Pizzolatto’s script were under-lined by the lyrics of the songs chosen by the show’s music supervisor, T.Bone Burnett.

This year’s theme-tune is ‘Nevermind’ by Leonard Cohen who intones gravely/gravelly: ‘The war was lost/The treaty signed/I was not caught/I crossed the line/I was not caught/Though many tried/I live among you/Well disguised/I had to leave/My life behind/I dug some graves/You’ll never find.’

In case we didn’t get the picture, the song that played over the premiere’s closing credits, even more appropriately, was Nick Cave’s grimly prescient ‘All the Gold In California.’

But if anything, it was the song between these that summed up the tone of ‘True Detective’s return best.

This was ‘The Only Thing Worth Fighting For’ performed by edgy country singer Lera Lynn from the stage of an empty bar like Pizzolatto’s homage to ‘Twins Peaks’ or ‘Blue Velvet.’

As we watched Woodrugh careering through the night on his motorbike and the cops played by Farrell and McAdams slowly destroying themselves, drinking their way to oblivion, Lynn closed the show droning in her scratchy drawl: ‘this is my least favourite life/the one where I’m out of my mind…’

It was (ironically) so dark it intimated, now that the premiere is out of the way, Pizzolatto might just be getting warmed up.

It would certainly be foolhardy to judge ‘True Detective 2’ already.

After all, if anyone can make another series as good as the first one, it’s him.