Fargo: Season 3

2010. Two brothers, Ray and Emmit Stussy, have been feuding for years over the inheritance from their late father. Emmit took his part of the inheritance and transformed himself into a millionaire, the "Parking Lot King of Minnesota". Ray took his part, his dad's car, and did nothing with it. Fuelled by bitterness and resentment (and his new girlfriend, Nikki Swango), Ray plots to get even. The result is a case of mistaken identity, a spate of killings and the hostile takeover of Ray's company by a mysterious Englishman named Varga. Caught in the middle is Gloria, a police officer whose imagination is fired up by the case but whose new boss is keen to sweep it under the carpet as soon as possible.

Fargo is an anthology series where each seasons forms one complete, self-contained story, each story linked to the rest (and to the original 1996 Coen Brothers movie) by a shared background. The third season is set five years after the events of the first but has almost no characters in common (one, relatively minor Season 1 character does show up later on though), although some background elements and similar themes are explored. What this season does share with its two forebears is an off-kilter, bizarre atmosphere and some rich, satisfying dialogue along with absolute killer performances by some exceptional actors at the top of their game.

Leading the charge this time around is Ewan McGregor. McGregor is always a fine actor, but is utterly exceptional in Fargo, playing the brothers Stussy with flair and wit, imbuing each brother with a different personality and even physical sensibility. It's not quite at Tatiana Maslany levels of exceptionalism as a multi-character performance, but it's an impressive piece of work. The other heavy-hitters, David Thewlis and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, are also superb but the higher-profile actors' work is almost stolen out from under them by the lesser-known Carrie Coon as Gloria, who is charismatic, funny, passionate and smart. There's also a host of scene-stealing performances from other actors in smaller roles, such as the always-fantastic Mary McDonnell, Olivia Sandoval as another police officer and Shea Whigham as the PTSD-suffering new police chief who is looking for a quiet life.

The third season is still off-kilter and bizarre, featuring an extended animated story about a robot travelling into the distant future, an awful lot of people playing Bridge and some slightly surreal sequences in which an all-knowing character (played by Ray Wise) shows up to comment on the metanarrative. There's also a whole episode set in the distinctly non-Minnesotan location of Los Angeles, just to mix things up a little. Those hoping for closer ties between the seasons may be disappointed; one minor Season 1 character showing up in a recurring role and a few nods to the bizarre UFO scene in Season 2 aside, this season stands mostly alone.

However, the third season of Fargo does have some problems. Season 1 of Fargo is probably the single finest season of television made in the last ten years and was utterly sublime and pitch-perfect from start to finish. Season 2 had a slower start but eventually got up to speed and almost rivalled the opening season. Season 3 starts very strongly, with a compelling story, richly-detailed characters, but then goes off the rails a bit. Producer-writer Noah Hawley seems to feel the strain of going back to the well for a third time and there's a lot of make-work mid-series as he tries to delay Gloria solving the murder mystery pretty much straight away. Fargo has never been necessarily rooted in outright realism, but some of Varga's abilities as he stays one step ahead of everyone seem quite ludicrous even by this show's generous standards. In fact, the characters are painted a little more broadly than in previous seasons, slightly larger than life without the grounding family roots the likes of Molly and Peggy had in previous seasons. This is still fun, but a little depth has been lost along the way. There's also the issue of violence: Fargo has never shied away from spilling blood when needed, but Season 3 gets a little trigger-happy and ends up wasting most of its cast by the end, often in ways that feel random rather than rooted in the needs of the story.

The show eventually circles back round and delivers a thrilling finale rooted in a fantastically-played central question: is the world good and does justice exist, or is there no justice and are those who do evil always doomed to get their comeuppence? The show doesn't offer an easy answer, but frames the question extremely well.

Season 3 of Fargo (****½) is the weakest to date, which is to say it's still probably the best-acted, best-shot and one of the best-written and directed shows you'll see this year. It struggles for pacing and energy a little more than the first two seasons and the news that there'll be a two-to-three year hiatus before Hawley returns for a fourth season does feel like a wise move. The series will be released in October 2017 on DVD in the UK and USA (and hopefully Blu-Ray, but there is no listing yet).

Fargo: Season 2

1979. There is a war brewing between a drugs gang based in Kansas City and an operation run by the Gerhardt family in Fargo, North Dakota. The conflict unexpectedly spirals out of control after an innocent couple, Peggy Blumquist and her butcher husband Ed, accidentally kill one of the Gerhardt sons. The conflict escalates, with Minnesota State Trooper Lou Solverson left to investigate and find those responsible.

When FX announced they were making a TV series based on the 1996 movie Fargo by the Coen Brothers, a lot of people including the Coen Brothers thought they were insane. Instead, the first season of Fargo turned out to be, quite possibly, the greatest individual season of television since (at least) the fourth season of The Wire aired a decade ago. The bar was raised impossibly high for a second season.

Fortunately, writer/producer Noah Hawley had a trick up his sleeve. Fargo is, at least nominally, an anthology series where each season has its own cast and self-contained story. The seasons all take place in the same fictional universe (as each other and the film) so references and very occasional characters cross over, but overall each season stands alone as its own story. And throughout the first season, the character of Lou Solverson (Keith Carradine) makes oblique references to something horrendous that happened in Sioux Falls in 1979. Season 2 tells us that story.

That tale is nothing less than a war story, a clash for territory and control between the Kansas City Mob and the Gerhardt family based in Fargo, North Dakota. The situation escalates into all-out war when one of the sons of the Gerhardt family is inadvertently killed by Peggy and Ed Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons), a quiet, ordinary couple trying to live the American Dream in their own way. Ed is soon mistaken as a ruthless, murderous contract killer ("The Butcher") by both the Gerhardts and the Kansas City boys, with local law enforcement officers Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) and Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) having to try to protect the hapless couple.

That's not really the whole story. There's also Lou's home issues, with his wife Betsy (Cristin Milioti) suffering from cancer. There's the murderous gun-for-hire Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) who works for the Kansas City crew but finds his career prospects hampered by racial prejudice. And there's a very enigmatic Native American Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) who works for the Gerhardt family as an enforcer...up to a point. And that's not even mentioning the misadventures of local drunk lawyer Karl Weathers (Nick Offerman) and the fact that Ronald Reagan (Bruce Campbell) is hitting the campaign trail in the state int he midst of the chaos.

The second season of Fargo is busier than the first and, it has to be said, is not quite as good. However, it's still probably the single finest season of television you'll see this year. The second season is a little more diffuse, less focused and less finely-characterised than the first season. We don't have quite as finely-tuned a clash of personalities as the three-way battle of wits between Lorne Malvo, Lester Nygaard and Molly Solverson in the first season. But it's damn close. The second season feels a bit more inclined to pursue random tangents for the sake of character or even just a laugh (whoever cast Bruce Campbell as Ronald Reagan needs to be given a raise, immediately) before pulling itself together in the last few episodes to deliver the promised carnage at Sioux Falls and it delivers that with aplomb.

Plaudits can be poured onto the series freely. Kirsten Dunst and Ted Danson are two very familiar faces from American film and television, but here give career-best performances. Dunst plays Peggy as a somewhat self-obsessed (if not blinkered) housewife in a marriage to someone who doesn't entirely suit her, but then is unexpectedly able to capitalise on the carnage to help her "self-actualise" (to borrow her self-help guru's terminology), although fortunately not in as quite an evil direction as Lester in the first season. It's a tricky character to nail but Dunst does so with impressive skill. Danson also does excellent work as the sheriff trying to keep a lid on the chaos that is threatening to blow up in his town. In fact, all of the actors put in incredibly strong turns with Patrick Wilson being totally convincing as the younger version of Keith Carradine's character from the first season and Nick Offerman delivering a dramatic, powerful performance that shows his much greater range than just playing comedy, as he has done recently (although his drunk lawyer character does provide a few laughs as well).

Complaints? Well, the pacing is a bit odd. The central story is surprisingly thin, and unlike the first season this one feels like it could have had a few episodes shaved off it...until you get to the final three or four episodes which come after that peak and realise the genius of the writers in how they've structured the season. So that complaint is pretty quickly dispensed with. As mentioned above the show is a bit more willing to explore tangential subplots this year, but most of those subplots are excellent in their own right, so that's not really an issue either. Something that has sharply divided viewers is the emergence of science fictional elements in the story, which twice (in the first and ninth episodes) play a decisive role in events. My guess is that isn't really an SF element at all and is a result of the writers planting story seeds for future seasons, but in the context of this year by itself feels very random, although it does play into the 1970s theme quite well.

But it's still a gripping, intelligent and beautifully-written season (****½) of television, with an even larger hint of the weird about it. The series will be released on 23 February on DVD in the United States and on 25 April (because it takes two months to cross the Atlantic in 2016, clearly) in the UK. The show will be released on Blu-Ray as well but these editions have not yet been listed.

Fargo: Season 1

2006. Chameleonic assassin Lorne Malvo passes through the town of Bemidji, Minnesota. A chance encounter with a put-upon, stressed-out salesman named Lester Nygaard unleashes a chain of chaotic events, culminating in multiple murders. The local police force is eager to sweep the chaos under the rug, but Deputy Molly Solverson realises that there is more going on than first appears. When a Duluth police officer, Gus Grimly, has his own close run-in with Malvo, the two officers join forces to bring the assassin to justice.

At first glance, a TV series based on the 1996 movie Fargo seems like a crazy idea. The film, directed by the Coen Brothers, is idiosyncratic, unique and offbeat. Turning it into a weekly TV series sounds like a lunatic idea, which is why the Coen Brothers initially refused to have anything to do with it. After seeing the first episode, they changed their mind and signed on as producers. It’s easy to see why. The first season of Fargo, the TV series, may be the most genius single season of television produced this decade.

The connections between the TV series and the movie are slim. The TV series uses some ideas and tropes from the film and echoes a few of its ideas, but in terms of actual connective tissue the only element used is a briefcase of money left in the snow in the film, which a character stumbles over in the TV show. If you’ve never seen the film it’s not important whatsoever. It’s also a relief to learn that Fargo, like True Detective, is an anthology series. Each season will take place in a different time period with a different cast (Season 2 will take place in 1979 in South Dakota, for example). The series is set in the same “universe”, so if you watch the whole thing you’ll notice all the little connecting details, but broadly speaking it’s not necessary. You can enjoy this as a single, ten-episode mini-series with no major dangling plot threads.

One of the benefits of these anthology series is that they represent a short-term commitment for major film actors who might balk at a longer stint on a TV show. The result is that Fargo’s cast is peppered with famous faces from film and TV: Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne and Martin Freeman as Lester are the main draws and most famous faces, but Colin Hanks also appears in the role of Gus and Breaking Bad’s Bob Odenkirk slotted in his appearance as semi-incompetent police chief Oswalt before filming Better Call Saul. Keith Carradine (Wild Bill Hickock from Deadwood and too many film appearances from the 1970s onwards to count) has a small but crucial role as Lou Solverson (a younger Lou will be a key character in the second season). The show also has time to turn up trumps with a new talent: Allison Tolman gets her big break as Molly and is absolutely brilliant, holding her own against the other actors and turning in a barnstorming mixture of resolve, frustration and not wanting to rock the boat but really going for it if she believes it’s the right thing.

Thornton gets one of the best roles of his career with Lorne, an assassin who likes to keep his targets off-balance with existential and literal-minded musings, an absolute absence of any kind of fear and a thousand-yard stare that has cops backing away from him at traffic stops. At different times he has to pose as other people, or go undercover for months to win over a target’s trust, and Thornton’s ability to spin his performance on a dime is astonishing. Freeman is also exceptional; inverting his usual performance as quiet nice guys to play a hard-pressed working man who initially wins the viewer’s sympathy, but by the end of the season has turned into a loathsome, murderous little weasel. Lester’s descent feels like watching all of Breaking Bad compressed into ten episodes, but never feels rushed or implausible.

What makes the show work is the way it channels the oddness of the Coen Brothers without feeling like a parody of it. Dialogue is written in the same slightly off-kilter way and there’s the same, understated and intriguing tone to the direction, occasionally punctuated by memorable set-pieces: Lorne’s one-man assault on a mafia-filled business is darkly hilarious, amusingly cost-conscious (they can’t afford the full shoot-out so we only hear it as the camera pans up the outside of a building, interrupted only by brief views of the carnage through windows) and extremely audacious. Not many directors or writers could take on the Coen Brothers and match them, especially over ten hours, but the team here manage it. It’s something that continues throughout the series, which is also not exactly reluctant to set up characters for episodes and hours on end and then kill them in off-handed, arbitrary ways that even Joss Whedon might balk at. This, coupled with the show’s short run time, adds a real sense of danger to proceedings which maintains the tension.

There are a few minor flaws. Some story points turn on the fact that the local police force and its new chief (counting the days to retirement) really don’t want to investigate the murders in too much detail, jumping on the most convenient story available to declare it closed. Whilst this closed-minded bureaucratic viewpoint is believable, it does get a little frustrating that supposed servants of the law seem to be extremely uninterested in finding out the truth if it is inconvenient to them. At the same time, it makes us empathise strongly with Molly as she also becomes incredulous at their intransigence, so it works on that level.

The first season of Fargo (*****) is, quite simply, brilliant. The writing is top-notch, the performances are flawless and the series can turn from being laugh-out-loud hilarious to gut-wrenchingly terrifying in the space of seconds. It’s offbeat, different and ambitious. You can get it now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).