After mid-series slumps by the two best dramas on television, Fargo and True Detective are back.
That’s not to say back and better than ever. Fargo’s second season and Detective’s first weren’t just good; they were industry highlights. Commercial films don’t reach the bar freshman Detective and sophomore Fargo set. So asking the same of later seasons is an impossibility.
Not that both shows don’t make Herculean efforts — and nearly manage — to recreate the magic. Fargo wrapped its fifth season this week with a watch-it-twice finale. Jon Hamm, who played a suave seducer in Mad Men, makes a chilling killer in Fargo. He hasn’t been this good in 15 years.
Like Fargo Season 2, this installment is well aware of its time (2019) and its political backdrop (Trumpism). Hamm is a MAGA-brewed sheriff who calls on all “patriots” to get ready for a confrontation with law enforcement (sound familiar?). When the monied protagonist demands to circumvent local authorities and go federal, she snaps “Get me the orange idiot.”
There are no idiots in Detective, now in its fourth year. Unlike Fargo, whose first season was a barn-burner, Detective has had but one good season, the first.
Until now. Detective’s premise is an intriguing one: A group of Alaskan geologists disappear, only to resurface murdered and frozen in a block of ice. Was it a serial killer? A cop? A raging environmentalist?
The question and premise might be enough to propel a solid season. But the real wind in its sails is Jodie Foster, who plays the lead investigator.
Foster may be the only actress with the gravitas for the role. She won an Oscar last century playing a cop in Silence of the Lambs, and her transformation from eager recruit then to embittered supervisor now makes for a slipper-fit. This iteration of Detective may suffer from a bit of wokism, but when Foster clenches her jaw, you’re looking at a cop too old for this shit.
Fargo is already wrapped, and Detective has just a couple months before it’s gone. So the reprieve will be brief.
But, save for Succession and Jury Duty, the TV landscape was a steaming bowl of suck in 2023. Here’s to true stories turning tides.
One reason that Fargo the TV series is not more popular is because people think that it’s the small-screen version of Fargo the movie.
The error is understandable. Television has made a cottage industry out of taking films and stretching them into longer (more profitable) home entertainment. Think Snowpiercer, Watchmen, Friday Night Lights. Movies, but with commercials.
Fargo is not a movie with commercials. Fargo is a Coen Brothers trivia game with commercials. No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing and just about every movie Joel and Ethan Coen ever made are referenced in the series, which has spanned four seasons (so far), a half-century of ”true” crime stories and one zealous Coen Bros. fanboy, show runner Noah Hawley. If you play a Coens-reference drinking game, you are hospital-drunk by the half hour mark of any episode.
Hawley pays homage to the Coens the way Paul Thomas Anderson kneels at the altar of Stanley Kubrick: with an awe, reverence and an attention to the master’s style that cannot help but mimic brilliance, thus producing its own.
And nowhere is that more evident than in the second season, in 2015, perhaps the greatest 10-part crime story ever told. Which makes sense, since it’s a sly take on the greatest one-part crime story ever told: The Book of Job.
The Coens (who serve as executive producers) and Hawley have never said as much, and the season’s symbolism — particularly the neon blue UFO that plays such a critical role — is debated even now.
But the Coen Brothers have made careers out of religious parables, and Hawley has likewise chocked the series with biblical references. And season two is Sunday school with action sequences.
Consider these divine parallels with the bible and Fargo’s 1979 ”true crime” story about a couple that stumbles into a massacre at a Minnesota diner (spoilers abound):
The series begins when the target of the killing (Joan Cusack) tells a cautionary tale about Job’s plight to her murderer.
The hero, Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) is a man of unwavering virtue seemingly cursed by evil. Criminals menace him, cowards undercut him, his wife has cancer and his entire family faces existential uncertainty.
The villain, O’Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), pursues our hapless couple with a devilish determination — with flames as his licking backdrop.
The series ends with a cryptic conversation between the Devil (Hanzee) and an unnamed character known only as ”The Book.” The Book explains that the outcome of the ordeal was never in doubt. Is that you, God?
The story of Job seems tailor-made for the Coens, because no one has ever known quite what to make of Job.
The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with Satan, who claims he can make even goodly Job curse the deity. Soon, Job’s servants are killed. His children are killed. He is afflicted with painful boil. His life is a waking nightmare. But he refuses to curse God for what has befallen him. When he is at death’s door, God mysteriously spares him.
Similarly, Solverson refuses to surrender his belief in the good of people or the rule of law. He, too, is brought to death’s door until a mysterious savior: the Close Encounters-style UFO. In a literal Deus Ex Machina, the orb distracts a killer, allowing the hero to shoot himself out of an impossible pickle.
Much has been made of the UFO, its message, and Fargo’s larger statement about humankind’s treatment of each other.
But, like Barton Fink, Blood Simple and No Country, bafflements may be the point. The Coens love bafflements. Apparently, so does Hawley.
And, for the record, this is not a true story. Just a timeless one.
This is a true story. The events depicted occurred in Hollywood in 2020. At the request of Accuracy, the names have not been changed. Out of respect for the Truth, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. And lots of spoilers.
Perhaps the past really is prologue. By almost every metric, Fargo‘s fourth season, which concluded Sunday night, got the show back on track.
After two brilliant seasons and some unattainable expectations, the third installment of the anthology series felt like an inevitable disappointment last year. Critic response was lukewarm, and audience reaction lacked the fanboy frenzy of most Coen Bros. projects.
So the rebound isn’t wholly unexpected, and the fourth series still pales in comparison to its two prodigious predecessors. Still, the latest iteration suggests that Fargo the TV series may be up to something as brilliant as Fargo the taproot film. Namely, that creator Noah Hawley may be slyly piecing together stories of a single book whose chapters have been placed out of order.
That possibility became clearer with a Season 4 finale, Storia Americana, that is actually a prequel hand-off from Season 2, arguably the best season in the series this far.
And the newest season raised the tantalizing possibility that Hawley is making an adaptation of the fictional anthology The History of True Crime in the Mid West, a book that plays a noticeable role this season and in Season 2. Could all four tales be part of a single story?
The fictional book that’s appeared in two seasons.
After all, Hawley employed a similar crossover between Seasons 1 and 3: the deaf hitman Mr. Wrench. Distributing network FX has taken pains to make it clear: Each season is a standalone creature.
But could the next chapter (television gods willing) of Fargo reveal a larger tale? The Coens (who serve as executive producers) are nothing if not fond of layered stories. And Hawley appears untethered by network constraints to tell a quirky tale (this season ran 11 episodes instead of 10, and episodes routinely ran longer than an hour).
Mr. Wrench in a crossover role.
All of which begs the question: Is Hawley creating a larger “true crime” story in an homage to the brothers, gift-wrapped with Coen-like chronology leaps?
Season 4 is set in Kansas City, a key location in Season 2, and serves to document the formative years of rising crime syndicate boss Mike Milligan.
Other season-jumping Easter eggs this year: Joe Bulo, who is Milligan’s boss in Season 2, is a young thug who learns firsthand that the family crime business is dying; Mort Kellerman, the K.C. crime boss killed in Season 2, delivers an assassination of his own this year; and this season’s protagonist, Loy Cannon (Chris Rock), drops a Milligan quote in assessing how locals treat outsiders: “Pretty unfriendly, actually.”
Above: Joe Bulo, left, gets lessons in thuggery. Below, Mort Kellerman, right, delivers on.
It’s those inside jokes that underpin the series, which is, ultimately, a collection of Coen Brother tribute videos. Season 4 had plenty of discography nods, including No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona and, in particular, Miller’s Crossing.
Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing, left, Chris Rock in Season 4, right.
The young Milligan is a boy named Satchel Cannon (Rodney L. Jones III). He’s haloed by a clipped-wing nightingale known only as Rabbi Milligan (a terrific Ben Whimshaw). The poetic pairing of outcasts would merit a future name change to whatever you damn well please.
Satchel and Rabbi, left. Mike Milligan, right.
As usual, Hawley peppers each season with film-school level references to the Coen Brothers. He treats the duo with Kubrickian reverence, and the result is near-film-quality adoration. A “bad” Fargo episode is better than most shows’ best day.
And this season had plenty of good days, including the entire Wizard of Oz tribute episode East/West (no. 9) and the recurring ghost of Theodore Roach, the gnarled demon of slave ships past who haunted this season’s darkest scenes.
The show had a few missteps: There were a few too many characters to keep track of this time around, and the story made logic leaps previous seasons wouldn’t have attempted.
But the season finale, which ended on a beautiful surprise post-credit scene, brought the show so far back (or forward?) in its origins story it’s hard to think a larger tale isn’t unfolding.
And considering Hawley and company pulled this season off in the middle of a pandemic — when we most needed thoughtful, scripted television — it really doesn’t matter whether Fargo is a true story or not. As long as it’s a continuing one.
