SEASON PREMIERE: This HBO series was one of the first and more ambitious of the season-long anthology dramas – or whatever you call episodic dramas that reboot themselves each season, with new casts and stories under an overall umbrella title, such as American Crime Story, American Horror Story, and Fargo. And by now, the history of True Detective is generally acknowledged and accepted: Season 1 was terrific, and Season 2 closer to terrible. Now comes Season 3, hoping to revive and reclaim the franchise. Mahershala Ali, from the cinema’s Green Book (and, before that, from TV’s House of Cards, Alphas and Treme), stars as a detective working the Ozarks, and dealing with the same crime in three different time lines: when the crime involving missing children occurred, when a subsequent internal investigation was opened, and when a documentary crew, even more years later, probed the now-cold case. Stephen Dorff and Deborah Ayorinde co-star, and HBO gives this new season a jump start by presenting the first two episodes tonight in a double-barreled season premiere. Good move, because it takes that long for the sinister underpinnings of this new story to bubble to the surface. And it’s worth it. It’s too early to say whether Season 3 will match Season 1 – but it’s already better than Season 2, and Ali is a big part of it. For full reviews, see Ed Bark's Uncle Barky's Bytes and David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.