True Detective (2014), Looking (2014), and the Televisual Long Take

This chapter juxtaposes two recent experiments in the televisual long take, both featured in eight-episode HBO seasons from 2014: the crime drama True Detective and the serio-comic Looking. True Detective foregrounded a “declarative” long take halfway through its first season, an elaborate Steadicam immersion that quickly became one of the most celebrated shots in American television. By contrast with that one-off tour de force, Looking made “stealth” long takes part of its vocabulary from the beginning, including a shot from the eighth episode describing an awkward post-break-up San Francisco street scene. These two very different articulations of the shot as extended time mapped out divergent trajectories for the language of “cinema” in the territory of television: the auteurist announcement of mastery and the observational expression of uncertainty.