Set in the snowy wastelands of Minnesota, Minneapolis and the Dakota states, ‘Fargo’ offers a perfect backdrop for deadpan dialogue and the awful sledgehammer of irony.
A German crime family in Minnesota protects its turf. A smooth Afro-American killer named Mike Milligan comes to town. A beautician and her butcher husband become self-actualized. And a straight-shooting state trooper deals with his wife’s cancer while a gang war erupts.
Welcome back to the world of Fargo. The ingredients are laid out for yet another blast of Midwestern chill and mayhem, as the Coen Brothers wrap up their second season this week (Dec. 14 finale, available on iFlix).
TV’s Fargo — loosely adapted from Ethan and Joel Coen’s 1996 movie and developed by Noah Hawley — is a strange, wooly thing indeed. Possibly one of the best shows to arise in an already crowded “Golden Age of Television” marketplace, the first season focused on the acting tandem of Martin Freeman (The Hobbit) and Billy Bob Thornton, playing a mousy insurance salesman and sociopathic hit man, respectively. Not so much a sequel to the movie as a parallel universe with overlapping details, TV’s Fargo continues to veer boldly into metaphysical spaces that other shows rarely even dare to pull off. Never preachy or sentimental, it possesses the same wry humor and bitter irony as the Coens’ original story. Set in the snowy wastelands of Minnesota, Minneapolis and the Dakota states, it offers a perfect backdrop for deadpan dialogue and the awful sledgehammer of irony.
If there was a guiding moral principle to the movie, it probably came in Police Chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand)’s epilogue, when she tells her captured killer in the back of a patrol car: “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t ya know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.”
The folks in TV’s Fargo are equally perplexed by how bad things can come along out of nowhere to ruin your day. When beautician Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst) accidentally smacks her car into a killer fleeing a Waffle Hut (Kieran Caulkin) in Season 2, it’s only the start of her troubles. Rather than reporting the fatal accident to the police, she convinces her husband (Jesse Plemons), a local butcher, to do away with the evidence.
Unfortunately, he’s the youngest son of the Gerhardt clan, a feral group of third-generation German gangsters who face a takeover move by a larger syndicate in Fargo, North Dakota. Brokered by Joe Bulo (Everybody Loves Raymond’s Brad Garrett), the takeover is meant to go smoothly; but matriarch Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart) won’t roll over so easily, especially with a son gone missing.
Enter Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine), a quote-spouting killer with two henchmen — the Kitchen Brothers — who mostly talk with shotguns. Like so many visitors to the Midwest of Fargo, Milligan can’t quite figure out what’s so unusual about the locals — besides their accents, that is. “We’re a very friendly people,” shrugs State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson). “No, that’s not it,” says Milligan. “Pretty unfriendly, actually. But it’s the way you’re unfriendly. You’re so polite about it. Like you’re doing me a favor.”
Fargo opens brashly, on the set of an imaginary black and white Ronald Reagan movie called Massacre at Sioux Falls. (Foreshadowing Alert!) The movie’s director and an actor playing a Native American chief share a cigarette in the Midwest chill while waiting for the actor-turned-politician to emerge from his trailer. Jump to 1979, where America is beset by a mood of crisis: Jimmy Carter is president, oil prices are high, US hostages are about to be taken in Iran. It’s the kind of moral vacuum into which Reagan — a recurring figure seen only in glimpses, much like the visiting spaceships and prog-rock synth sounds on the soundtrack — cheerily steps, offering easy answers to a baffled America.
Also borrowed from the original Coen film are the peculiar speech patterns (“What’s that now?”) of the Midwest. In fact, part of the fun of the show is spotting references straight from the movie, either in snatches of dialogue, repeated characters, names, reappearing actors or locales — such as the infamous roadside mound of snow where Steve Buscemi buried a briefcase of swindled cash in the movie, a nexus of bad things that comes back in the first season and visually referenced in Season 2. As many TV series attempt these days, Fargo is also an anthology that begins each season fresh with a new story and new set of characters (True Detective tried this and failed; Fargo goes for a tangential connection, and this works much better: we know, for instance, that Trooper Solverson is the father of Deputy Molly Solverson [Alison Tolman] seen in Season 1).
From what began as a shaggy dog story, Season 2 of Fargo has shaped up to be yet another memorable entry in the expanding universe of must-see television. Look for great turns by Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman, Bruce Campbell (Ash vs. Evil Dead) as Ronald Reagan, Zahn McClarnon as a Native American gone rogue, and Ted Danson as an avuncular sheriff.
By the end of this season’s journey, other clues emerge linking the two series, as well as hinting at future directions: Episode 9 begins with Martin Freeman narrating from a book titled History of Crimes in the Mid West, and we see that the period of the book covers “1825 to the present.” Will season three takes us back a couple centuries to Frontier Fargo? Stay tuned.