#true-detective

Big-screen stars like Kevin Spacey, Matt Damon, Al Pacino, Vera Farmiga, Robin Wright, and Michael Douglas threaten to dominate this year’s Emmy Awards… are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson staking an early claim on next year’s nominations?

Yet another drama that’s likely to continue the discussion about how the best storytelling in Hollywood is on TV: “True Detective,” the upcoming HBO series that finds McConaughey and Harrelson starring as detectives who spend nearly two decades trying to track down a serial killer in Louisiana.

HBO debuted a trailer for the drama, which premieres in January, before Sunday’s season premiere of “Boardwalk Empire.” In the clip, seen above, Harrelson’s Martin Hart asks McConaughey’s Rust Cohle if Cohle ever thinks of himself as a bad man.

"The world needs bad men," Cohle says. "We keep the other bad men from the door."

[Related: Full Coverage of This Year’s Emmy Awards]

The eight-episode drama follows Cohle and Hart in their professional and personal lives, as they begin the search for a serial killer in the Bayou in 1995. The story unfolds via flashbacks and testimony from the duo in 2012, when the case is reopened, presumably after having taken a toll on both men.

Other cast members for the premiere season include Michelle Monaghan (“Source Code”) as Hart’s wife Maggie, Elizabeth Reaser (“Twilight”) as Cohle’s girlfriend, Michael Potts, and Kevin Dunn.

The series, written by Nic Pizzolatto (“The Killing”) and directed by Cary Fukunaga (“Jane Eyre”), is planned as an anthology series, where each season will revolve around a new case with new detectives, played by new actors each season. So perhaps a different pair of movie stars will get their own shot at Emmy in 2015…

Leven Rambin played Glimmer in The Hunger Games and in the film, her most famous to date, she died a miserable death, stung to death by tracker jackers in the post-apocalyptic entertainment. Her latest role might be even darker, though we can’t know for sure since the actress can’t reveal a thing about the new season of True Detective, which premiered June 21st on HBO.

With the True Detective season finale airing this Sunday, we have to thank Season 2 of HBO’s crime anthology for all the laughs it’s given us… even though it’s not a comedy.

Related: Get Caught Up With Our ‘True Detective’ Recaps

This season, writer Nic Pizzolatto’s hard-boiled film noir dialogue sometimes (OK, often) tipped over towards the absurd, so we’re paying tribute with this compilation of the most outlandish bits of dialogue we’ve endured this season. We’ve included everything from Ray’s morsel of wisdom, “Sometimes a good beating provokes personal growth,” to Frank’s immortal, should-be-on-a-T-shirt declaration: “It’s like blue balls… in your heart.”

In fact, you’ll notice Vince Vaughn’s Frank takes up the lion’s share of this terrible-lines montage, whether he’s joking about the frequency of his wife’s period or just teaching us vocabulary words like “stridency” and “louche.” We’d say we’ve already done the hard work in compiling Vaughn’s Emmy reel for him… but we’d hate to stymie his retribution. 

If you were looking for ‘80s rocker/soap star Rick Springfield in the new season of HBO’s True Detective and couldn’t find him, you’re not alone. Even Springfield’s closest friends didn’t recognize him. “I had a lot of friends email me and say, ‘You creeped me out,’ ‘I didn’t know it was you,’” the “Jessie’s Girl” singer tells Yahoo TV in a new video interview, posted above. 

Related: Get Caught Up With Our ‘True Detective’ Recaps

To play the role of tight-faced psychiatrist Dr. Irving Pitlor, Springfield underwent quite a physical transformation. The producers had him shave his beard and cut his hair, he says, and then “spray-painted it bowling-ball black, to look like a terrible dye job.” Plus, they yanked his face back with tape and elastic bands to simulate a face lift, and topped it off with “this horrible orange bad-tan makeup.”

Though it took a lot of work to become Dr. Pitlor, Springfield says, “It helped me get into character.” Great, now that all that’s settled, can Springfield explain for us what the heck is happening on True Detective this season? Because we’ll take whatever help we can get at this point. 

'True Detective' Season 2 Gets a Moody Trailer, and a Premiere Date

No need to keep searching for clues: We finally have our first look at footage from True Detective Season 2… and a premiere date.

The much-anticipated sophomore season of HBO’s crime anthology will debut Sunday, June 21 — that’s soon! — and the minute-long clip above gives us some tantalizing glimpses of what’s to come: Rachel McAdams as a badass cop leading raids with guns drawn; a grizzled (and mustached!) Colin Farrell facing off against slick criminal Vince Vaughn and putting on brass knuckles; a conflicted Taylor Kitsch getting into fights; and a mystery man putting on a ski mask and shushing us in a very creepy manner. (Along with haunting music and beautiful cinematography, of course.)

Related: ‘True Detective’ Season 2: Everything We Know So Far

We have to admit: For all the bad buzz surrounding the unorthodox Season 2 casting, this trailer has got us extremely excited to see what’s next. And we haven’t even heard any dialogue yet! In Nic Pizzolatto we trust.

New 'True Detective' Trailer: The Characters Speak! (And They All Have Issues)

We got our first taste of True Detective Season 2 last month with a dialogue-free teaser trailer that was heavy on mood and atmosphere. (That song!) Even without the actors saying a word, we were sold.

But still, it’d be nice to hear the characters, you know, talk a little at some point. And we get just that from HBO’s newly-released trailer, which you can watch above. The atmosphere is still there, with lots of sprawling highways and dusty back alleys — but each of the four big-name stars also get a line of cryptically portentous dialogue:

* Vince Vaughn, as career criminal Frank Seymon: “Sometimes your worst self… is your best self.” (Is he doing an accent? Too early to tell.)

* Colin Farrell, as detective Ray Velcoro, examining his bruised knuckles: “My strong suspicion is, we get the world we deserve.” (Hey, that would make a great tagline!)

* Taylor Kitsch, as highway patrolman Paul Woodrugh, riding a motorcycle in full CHIPs gear: “This isn’t me doing this. This isn’t me.”

* Rachel McAdams, as detective Ani Bezzerides, stabbing the hell out of a dummy with a knife: “This girl’s gone missing. Nobody cares. The interior’s poisoned, and suddenly worth billions. Nobody cares.”

We’re still a little fuzzy on the actual plot (OK, a lot fuzzy), but the visual grandeur we loved in Season 1 is on full display here, with Vaughn setting fire to a restaurant kitchen and Kitsch revealing what looks like a nasty full-body burn on his torso. Cancel our plans for June 21; we’re stocking our fridge with Lone Star beer as we speak.