In a bit of back-and-forth that wouldn’t have felt all that out-of-place coming from Rust Cohle and Marty Hart themselves, Woody Harrelson has shot down his old buddy Matthew McConaughey’s optimistic dreams of possibly returning to the True Detective franchise one of these days. Harrelson was (per People) talking to NBC’s Today about his upcoming return to the Now You See Me franchise, when he was asked about comments McConaughey has made about how the right script (and Harrelson’s involvement) might convince him to give the ol’ flat circle another spin. To which Harrelson responded, “Matthew’s so funny, but in fairness, never. Not a chance.”
Harrelson, understandably, is of the opinion that the first season of True Detective isn’t something that he and McConaughey can just recreate on a whim. (Certainly, the show itself has wrestled with that legacy, to varying degrees of success, in the years since we were all losing our minds about Carcosa and flashy no-cut action sequences back in 2014.) “It turned out great,” Harrelson said of his season. “I love that it turned out the way it did. If anything, doing another season would, I think, tarnish that.” (Meanwhile, McConaughey—who’s been in a stepped-back mode re: Hollywood for a couple of years—has occasionally tried to at least ostensibly tap into the greatness again, notably with frequent and so-far failed attempts to get a new project off the ground with series creator Nic Pizzolatto.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean Harrelson has closed the door on doing anything with McConaughey, as connoisseurs of the duo’s current collaborative project well know: The pair has been working for years on a half-hour comedy project about them and their families living together on McConaughey’s Texas ranch, reportedly titled Brother From Another Mother. Last we’d heard, that show had been taken down by that old bugbear “creative differences,” after showrunner David West Read departed the project over disagreements about how the comedy series should end. But Harrelson still alluded to it in the Today interview, saying, “We are doing something together and this is a comedy, half-hour, and hopefully people dig it,” so perhaps hope springs eternal for those of us weirdly fixated, not on gritty, eldritch-adjacent crimes, but on these two men’s very odd sitcom dreams.
