True Detective and the southern gothic

Kim Cattrall in a 2013 performance of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird Of Youth, a play characterised by its violence, melodrama, sex and  American deep south setting.

True Detective makes reference to a number of genres through its eight episodes. There are elements of the crime genre, including the police procedural and buddy cop subgenres, as well as elements of action, gangster, horror and more.

Arguably the genre that True Detective most resembles is the southern gothic. This very specific genre is similar to social realism in the sense it is associated with a specific geographical location, in this case the American deep south. The southern gothic comes from the European gothic horror tradition, but is very much its own beast. Examples of texts that have been described as southern gothic include the melodramatic plays of Tennessee Williams,  the claustrophobic anxiety of No Country for Old Men (2007), the grotesque Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird. These texts are rather different from one another, but there are a number of themes and paradigms that make up the southern gothic. Here are a few.

Alienation

Crime

Violence

Flawed central characters

Disturbing events

Discussions of the cultural character of the American South

Strange and/or sinister rural communities

Villains who disguise themselves as innocents

Perversion

Grotesque actions and characters

A dry, desolate, hot and oppressive landscape

Moral ambiguity and moral vacuums

Obsession

Pessimism

Corruption

To what extent is True Detective a true southern gothic text? What specific examples can you discover from the first episode alone? And why has such a specific and frankly depressing genre still popular to this day?

Thanks to Tanya for the southern gothic genre paradigms!