I was a relative latecomer to the new HBO series True Detective, which is now three short chapters away from the end of its engrossing eight-episode arc. It wasn't until last Sunday that I jumped in, and, after flinching my way through the graphic murder scene depicted in the pilot, I quickly became obsessed—in the past week I've watched each episode at least twice, and have waded deep into seemingly bottomless Internet pits of analysis and interpretation (and parody). True Detective is so tremendous that calling it a TV show almost sounds like an insult—the thing unspools like a dense yet taut seven hour film, or a macabre, metaphysical novel rendered with such vivid prose that you can watch it play out on a screen inside your head. Or maybe it's watching YOU on a screen inside ITS head, man.

It figures that the show's creator and sole writer, Nic Pizzolatto, was an unknown novelist and short story writer from Louisiana; his debut series is rich with metaphor about storytelling and the ways we struggle (and fail) to coax narrative from the chaos. Pizzolatto hit the "jackpot," as he puts it, when Matthew McConaughey read his spec script and agreed to produce, and star, in the series, which is hard to imagine without him. McConaughey, who I loved in Dazed & Confused and then hated in countless movie posters for insipid romantic comedies I never saw, is enthralling here. He plays Rust Cohle, a mysterious and seemingly twisted homicide detective who, along with his partner, the reliably superb Woody Harrelson, gets sucked into a ritualized "meta-psychotic" murder investigation that pushes both to the brink of ruin... and beyond.

The entire cast, from Michelle Monaghan (she plays Harrelson's wife) to smaller players like the victim's imprisoned ex-husband Brad Carter, is well-nigh perfect, but McConaughy is the lodestar here. The action oscillates back and forth between the 1995 murder of a prostitute in Erath, Louisiana and the year 2012, when McConaughy and Harrelson talk about the case to investigators probing an eerily similar homicide. Weathered by his obsessions and, we're led to believe, his alcoholism, McConaughy's Cohle holds forth in the interview room with mystical gravitas, while the flashbacks to his '95 self evoke an equally creepy but somehow very different version of an alienating character who, to your surprise, becomes increasingly likable as the story unfolds. In that sense, it's almost as if McConaughy is portraying two characters, and we're left to wonder if a third waits in the wings.

We're left to wonder a lot of things, because True Detective is a show that keeps pitching you around on unsteady ground. Last night's mind-bending episode (the "most special" of all Pizzolatto's "children") came hot on the heels of the season's heart-pounding plot-driven fourth episode, which climaxed with a sustained, incredibly choreographed tracking shot that rivaled Children of Men in its virtuosity. I realize I'm telling you next to nothing about the show in terms of details; if that's what you're looking for, there are some excellent recaps here and here. My point is that there are just three episodes left, and you've got a full week to binge on the previous five before next Sunday... and once you watch chapter two you'll want to read this explication of The Yellow King. And then go nuts in the sub-Reddit, because part of True Detective's success is that it invites (and rewards) active participation.

All that needs saying for the uninitiated is that director Cary Fukunaga and Pizzolatto have attained a rare level of auteur prowess with this marvelously complex story—there is no team of writers, no rotating series of guest directors—and as a result, the whole unnerving drama unfolds with a stunning, sustained focus. At the center of it lurks McConaughy, who may have the same name as that douche from The Wedding Planner but is definitely a different actor altogether, delivering a performance of unprecedented depth.