Last night I cooked chicken for dinner. I am obsessively meticulous about continuously washing my hands and utensils when cooking, especially with raw chicken.

Rah, Chicken

In fact, my fixation on food preparation and cleanliness borders on pathological. I had a boss once who walked into the restroom on our floor with an uncovered salad from the cafeteria downstairs. I’d rather have witnessed a plane crash.

Seriously, he just set it on the counter while he peed, letting his open salad mingle with airborne particles of his colleagues’ excreta. I’m lathering up with hand sanitizer now just from typing about it.

So last night, as I tore open the clear plastic chicken packaging, for some reason I thought about how disgusting it would be to just lick the raw chicken. That would be the kind of trauma from which I might not recover. So “lickin’ the chicken” took root in my head as one of the grossest phrases imaginable.

Unless Matthew McConaughey said it. His easy Texas drawl just pats you on the shoulder and hands you a beer no matter what he’s saying. He would make it sound like a cool catchphrase, something you wished you could hang out with him and do after surfing.

“Hey, Matthew, what’s up, how’s it going?”

“Alright alright, you know, JK liivin’, just lickin’ the chicken.”

Given that he landed on Neptune in his SAG award speech for best actor recently, I’m hopeful that he will somehow find this and work “lickin’ the chicken” into his likely upcoming Oscar™ acceptance speech.

Which brings us to his current project, the astounding series True Detective on HBO. He and Woody Harrelson absolutely mesmerize in their roles as Louisiana State police detectives alternately investigating in flashback and currently reflecting on a murder set 18 years prior. McConaughey crackles with dazzling, forceful nihilism. And Harrelson startles viewers with a turn as a volatile, complicatedly sinister cop and husband with what seems to be a genuine but entirely pliable morality. Their evolving narratives slowly fill the gaps of their complex and ferociously flawed characters, as well as the pursuit and apparent capture of the murderer.

Scenes bring you to your knees with their riveting visual power and dark beauty. At times every fractional second is exhilarating and fascinating. Below is one such scene, the harrowing chunk of dynamite that closed out the fourth and most recent episode.

Even if you don’t know the full setup for the story, this scene will amaze you. Quick context: McConaughey is undercover with a drug gang staging a violent raid on a rival gang. His crew members are falsely dressed as cops in the scene. That’s really all you need to know to behold the fierce artistry of this six-minute, unbroken one-track scene.

Here, Inquisitr.com breaks down how they filmed the remarkable scene.

And here author Michael M. Hughes takes an interesting look at how the show incorporates an obscure 1895 work or strange fiction called The King in Yellow, written by Robert W. Chambers.

Deadwood has long been my favorite TV drama ever, but I have a feeling that may change by the time this eight-episode season ends.