The Best Partnerships on TV Aren’t Romantic. HBO’s Weirdest Hit Keeps Proving It.

We don’t get to see much of Miles Archer (Walter Long), business partner to detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon. Archer shows up in the first scene, lanky and flashily dressed, foolishly ogling a potential client who is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), the ultimate femme fatale, using a fake name. In the next scene, he’s shot dead. Nevertheless, Archer plays a key role in the story’s denouement. After figuring out that Brigid killed Archer, and despite having fallen for her himself, Spade turns her over to the cops. “When a man’s partner is killed,” he explains, “he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner.”

That’s partly Spade’s personal moral code speaking, but it’s also an abiding theme in crime fiction: the transcendent, almost mystical bond between detective partners. The latest season of True Detective ends with a shot of Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) sipping coffee on the deck of a lakeside cabin while her onetime partner Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) can be glimpsed through a window, smiling at the other end of the deck. Since Navarro has been shown earlier succumbing to her family’s strange propensity for walking out onto the Arctic ice and into oblivion, this communion is arguably supernatural. That’s how strong the connection gets between detective partners: It can even defy death.

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, the OG sleuth pairing, set the pattern. Watson initially served as a handy device for Holmes’ creator: a conventional man of action able to narrate the exploits of an eccentric hero who’d never bother to write them down himself. Together, Holmes and Watson turned 221B Baker St. into the site of a perpetual Boys’ Own adventure yarn, interrupted only by Watson’s brief marriage and the three-year period during which Holmes pretended to be dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to be rid of both of them. Desire brought Holmes and Watson back to their Baker Street idyll, but not the kind of desire certain fans like to imagine kindling between the roommates. Instead, it was the public’s unquenchable longing to see the two men reunited and suspended in late-Victorian amber, ever ready to interview a new client or dash out together on a fresh case.

American television may be known for its maverick loner detectives, but its duos are just as iconic. In Britain, partnered detectives are even more central to crime series, where the generational succession resembles that of English monarchs. Through 24 seasons of Midsomer Murders, two successive Detective Chief Inspector Barnabys—Tom (John Nettles), followed by his cousin John (Neil Dudgeon)—have run through a string of five detective sergeants, each keenly mourned by fans. These are partnerships that never end, even if the principals change a bit. What we want from our detective duos is something eternal.

According to hoary formula, detective partners must have contrasting but complementary qualities and temperaments—two incomplete individuals who form a balanced whole, the better to solve crimes. A sensitive intellectual must be teamed with an earthy pragmatist, a player with a family man, and so on. In American TV, the pairing is often cross-racial: Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) in Miami Vice, McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk (Wendell Pierce) in The Wire, Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) in Law & Order. The utopian dream embedded in such combos holds that a shared commitment to the job can bridge the great chasm of American social life. In the second season of NYPD Blue, the scruffy, bigoted Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) initially bridles when paired with the elegant, racially ambiguous Bobby Simone (Jimmy Smits), but Simone soon wins his respect and eventually his friendship, and Sipowicz asks Simone to be best man in his wedding. By that time, the 1993 pilot of Homicide: Life on the Street had already treated this racist-detective character arc as a cliché in need of tweaking by having Black detective Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) call his Italian-American partner Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito) a “salami brain,” prompting Crosetti to draft a mock discrimination complaint.

With Cagney & Lacey, the story of two seemingly incompatible detectives becoming close friends had acquired another twist: The two women (an ambitious single woman and a less-driven wife and mother) have to circumvent the smirking sexism of their lieutenant, who in the first episode insists that they spend their shifts undercover posing as streetwalkers. Instead of the blustering, obliquely defensive way that male detectives typically have it out with each other on TV, the first episode of Cagney & Lacey offered the astonishing spectacle of two people straightforwardly addressing their feelings. Lacey (Tyne Daly) accuses Cagney (Meg Foster), who has nearly gotten herself killed working solo on a serial killer case, of disregarding both teamwork and friendship. “You want to be a star,” she says angrily. In response, Cagney … sheepishly admits that Lacey is right. What could they be but inseparable?

Cross-gender partnerships inevitably stir up intimations of romance. Not that some fans haven’t fantasized about same-sex canoodling, going all the way back to Holmes and Watson and flaring up extravagantly in the fandom of Sherlock, Steven Moffat’s stylized, information-age update of the franchise, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. A few male–female partners seem more immune to innuendo: The traumatic cases dealt with by Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for example, would make that tasteless. But even the most clueless viewers had to wonder about Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) in Bones and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Flirtation and slow-burn consummation were baked into the premises of Moonlighting and Remington Steele, and viewers only moderately intrigued by the whodunits stuck around to see the central pair get together at last. But I can’t be the only one who appreciated how long Bones put off the crowd-pleasing collapse of Brennan and Booth’s platonic partnership into the inevitable, banal love affair. For a while there, the series’ refusal to give in was the best thing about the show.

As for Mulder and Scully, well, there’s a reason The X-Files spawned a juggernaut of fan fiction. A friend who once wrote X-Files fic told me that before the pair finally did become a couple, members of the fandom believed that if they could just cobble together enough clips of shared glances and other hints at romantic yearning between Mulder and Scully, they would finally prove that “love is real.” But love is real, even when it’s not romantic. As Issa López, the showrunner for True Detective: Night Country, told Slate’s Rebecca Onion when asked about viewers who’d like to see Danvers and Navarro couple up, “There are definitely loves that are deeper than romantic love. And I’m a firm believer in this, and I believe these women love each other to a level and to a depth that goes beyond romance.”

Shippers are gonna ship, and by all means let a million fics bloom, but in truth, their fantasy isn’t about wanting to see a detective partnership (of whatever gender mix) turn into something “more.” There isn’t anything more. Instead, the fantasy is that a romance could ever be as indestructible as a detective partnership. Cupid should be so lucky. Romantic love is heady but volatile and typically ephemeral. People cheat, get bored, fall out of love, realize they don’t like each other that much anymore. But as Sam Spade observed, it doesn’t make any difference what you think of your detective partner: You stick to him and up for him all the same.

While partnership has been an abiding theme of the whole True Detective series—let’s just pass over the rudderless second season as an exception that proves the rule—the humorlessness of the series’ original creator, Nic Pizzolatto, has kept it from doing full justice to the subject. The true apotheosis of TV detective partnerships is Homicide: Life on the Street, a cornucopia of workplace banter and bonding to which the numerous murder cases handled by the Baltimore PD often take a back seat. In Season 2, Detective John Munch (Richard Belzer) strolls into the team’s favorite bar, announcing that his life has been ruined. His partner, Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty), has been suspended for refusing to attend a mandatory counseling session. Munch announces to the room that, having lost his partner, he doesn’t want to be a detective anymore. “I’ve considered the other possible partners, but none of them works out for me,” he explains. “There’s none of them who can insult the way I dress, the way I drive, the way I eat, my politics, my handwriting, my posture, my health, my brand of toothpaste.”

A detective partnership is an impossible match—a match made in hell—that in the crucible of shared purpose becomes rock-solid. The partners come to love each other in spite of having nothing else in common besides their quest for the truth. Who wouldn’t be humbled by this love’s ability to transcend all the mundane friction in a relationship until finally the friction itself—the insults Munch misses so much—becomes something you love? It runs contrary to everything we think we know about why people care for one another, which is why it feels so much like grace. When Sipowicz finally realizes that Simone is that kind of partner, his opposite and his complement, he offers to accompany Simone on an unpleasant errand for a friend. “Who do you think you are, the Lone Ranger?” Sipowicz says, as if he’d never doubted the other man. “C’mon, I’ll ride along with you.”