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Notes -
But in the show that kicked this discussion off (True Detective) this isn't true. Navarro is a schizophrenic with anger issues whose mistakes allow her sister to commit suicide and then provokes fights in order to have herself punished and beaten for her failure and is unable to have mature emotional relationships. Danvers is a bitter, emotionally repressed, failure of a wife and mother, tormented by the death of her husband and son, who treats everyone terribly and drinks and has meaningless sex a lot.
They make obvious mistakes, mess up a lot (missing huge clues that are right in front of them) and are pretty clearly flawed in a lot of ways. They are both unlikable characters. And this appears to have been intentional as Jodie Foster describes her character as a horrible Alaskan Karen. Most of the criticism above is not that they were Mary Sues but that they were portraying mostly masculine character traits. Most of the traits we see for them would be entirely normal to see on a hard boiled male noir detective.
The arc they both go through interestingly is to be more open to feminine traits (being more emotionally present and open (and physically present for her kid in Danver's case), and to let go of the rigid hierarchal structure of the law, to see the predominantly female scut work in the town as worthy of respect. It's certainly a feminist message in that respect, but you could have swapped in two male detectives as the leads who would learn the same message without having to change anything pretty much.
For a spoiler we meet a weak female character early on who is missing fingers, they find a palm print on the murder victims clothes which matches those missing fingers, yet dismiss the suspect due to her status. It turns out she was indeed part of the group that murdered the victims. The group of female cleaners has access to the various pieces of information they needed to solve the crime they were avenging because they were able to wander around the police station, lab facility and everywhere else in town as no-one gave them a second thought including our two female lead cops.
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