The first season of Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective (2014) is not only a show about a murder, but also a show about how to gather and organize information in an archive. Having identified two archival problems—its temporal and topical extension—the article turns to Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression in order to explain how the archiving problems of the crime investigation are, in fact, intrinsic to any archiving practice. Lastly, the article addresses the political significance of the show's archiving problems by help of Derrida's text on the American Constitution and of Hardt and Negri's Empire.