The commercial scale of the Hunger Games films — four films that grossed collectively approximately 2.9 billion dollars — introduced him to the generation of viewers who had grown up after Cheers and who encountered him first as Haymitch. For those viewers, the biographical connection to Charles Harrelson was something they might subsequently discover rather than something that preceded their encounter with the actor. He was, to that generation, the mentor figure in a dystopian franchise — and, for those who looked further, the Oscar-nominated actor who had been on Cheers, and further still, the son of a convicted federal judge killer. The biographical connections accumulated in reverse chronological order, depending on when you encountered him.
Between the Hunger Games films, he continued taking roles in independent and prestige work that kept the earlier part of his career’s register alive alongside the franchise work. The combination — franchise films that reached the largest possible audience alongside smaller films that demonstrated continued artistic range — is the career strategy that the most successful actors of his generation have pursued with varying degrees of success. For Harrelson, the combination worked because the franchise work didn’t crowd out the smaller work and because the smaller work continued to be good enough to attract the attention of filmmakers whose projects were genuinely ambitious.
## Marty Hart’s Self-Deception and What It Required
When True Detective premiered in January 2014, it immediately generated a level of critical attention that is relatively rare for any television program: it was discussed not just as good television but as something that deserved sustained critical analysis of the kind usually reserved for literature. The show’s philosophical ambitions — its engagement with Rust Cohle’s pessimistic metaphysics, its visual and formal inventiveness, its portrait of Louisiana landscape and culture — were the primary subject of that criticism.