I believe one reason people are not as fond as subsequent seasons of True Detective after the first season is that the marketing of the first season carried this aura that this program would contain a story involving extremely excellent "true" detectives and the series did not disappoint in such portrayals.

Then, it was back to mediocre crime stories with mediocre detectives in the next seasons.

Not only that but for those who had read Nick Pizzolatto's novel Galveston, which was released in 2010, we knew the sort of storyteller that he could be.