An Oscar-Winning Director Nearly Made HBO's True Detective Season 1

Though Issa López's chilling and thrilling "True Detective: Night Country" was a standout entry in the anthology series, Season 1 remains one of the finest seasons of television ever crafted. The Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson-led drama mashed creator Nic Pizzolatto's multi-layered, elegiac writing with some of the best performances yet seen on the small-screen. But it was Cary Joji Fukunaga who shaped the all-enveloping atmosphere of barely concealed dread that made "True Detective" so darkly compelling.

Fukunaga was the perfect directorial choice for the series' inaugural season, but he wasn't the only one in the running. Before HBO began production on the detective drama, Fukunaga faced some serious competition in the form of Alejandro González Iñárritu. That's right, the Oscar-winning director of "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" and "The Revenant" nearly oversaw the Pizzolatto-penned series himself. At least until he dropped out of the project.

With Fukunaga taking the reins, "True Detective" premiered on January 12, 2014, only 10 months before "Birdman" debuted in the U.S. On the surface, then, it would appear as though the director left the former to focus on what ended up being his first Oscar-winning picture. But according to Iñárritu, it has more to do with his preference for working with his own scripts.

In a 2015 interview with The Playlist, Iñárritu told the outlet that he dropped out of "True Detective" to do "Birdman." But things weren't actually that simple. The director spoke about his ongoing struggle to find a script written by someone other than himself. "To go through that kind of interchange or cost has to be something that is something very personal, and something that you want to go through all that for," he explained. "And until now I haven't found an external script that I love."

But it seems that Pizzolatto came closer than any other to convincing the director to oversee something that wasn't all his own. "It was a superb script," the director admitted. "I had a meeting with the writer, he gave me the second script, and I knew that it would be great." While he admitted that part of him wanted to tackle "True Detective," he was ultimately pulled to his own projects. Thus, Iñárritu passed on the opportunity, which he, at the time, viewed as being for the best since it allowed him to write a pilot script of his own titled "1%," though the project never came to fruition.

"True Detective" Season 1 rightly became a huge success upon its 2014 debut. Critics praised everything from the writing to the performances, but also reserving plenty of acclaim for Fukunaga's inspired direction. However, the process of "True Detective" finding a director wasn't quite as simple as Fukunaga coming onboard after Iñárritu dropped out.

In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, show creator Nic Pizzolatto said he originally wrote the "True Detective" sample script to get work in the industry before Iñárritu became interested. It was this that prompted him to write a second episode. "Then, [Iñárritu] went off to make a movie," Pizzolatto explained, "and rather than wait, [Pizzolatto and his agent] decided to proceed with those episodes, choose a director, and cast the leads before we pitched it to anyone." In that version of events, Fukunaga simply replaced Iñárritu, and the rest was history. But there might have been a bit more back-and-forth involved.

"I had gotten [the job], and then Alejandro González Iñárritu was on it for a very short time, and then he slipped out and it came right back to me," Fukunaga revealed to The Daily Beast in 2014. In his recollection, he was nearly replaced on the series before Iñárritu dropped out. But whatever the case, given how "True Detective" turned out, the right man for the job won out — it's no wonder that some believe the show should've ended after one season. Since then, Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey reprised their "True Detective" roles for a 2025 ad urging Texas to create more incentives for filmmakers.