Spoiler alert: contains discussion of the entirety of Fargo’s first season. Do not read if you wish to avoid plot details.
I have a theory that nobody actually wanted to like Fargo when it first appeared on our screens this year. We might have now got used to the notion that commissioning editors are camouflaging their catastrophic lack of ideas by cannibalising the movies – after all, everything from Teen Wolf to Nikita to Sleepy Hollow had already been turned into a series and even last year’s best show The Returned was based on a film – but, even so, Fargo felt a step too far.
Fargo was a sacred cow. It was too beloved, too singular, to be chopped up and sold for parts like this. Even with the best intentions in the world, a television adaptation would only serve to dilute the impact of the original. Worse still, the first two-thirds of episode one seemed to conclusively back up these fears.
Why were we being made to side with Martin Freeman’s impotent loser Lester Nygaard? Who was supposed to be playing Steve Buscemi’s character? And, most importantly, why was Marge Gunderson – one of the great female icons of our time – now being played by a man?
But then, in a jaw-dropping moment of TV sleight-of-hand, everything suddenly snapped into focus. The male police chief, the man who we’d started to resent for not being Frances McDormand, was murdered out of the blue. Far from being the cuddly underdog, Nygaard was revealed to be a brutal and opportunistic killer. And Lorne Malvo – the enigmatic character played by Billy Bob Thornton – turned out to be like nothing we could have ever expected. He was the living spirit of evil, an agent of chaos like Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men upped and dropped into Minnesota.
We’d been tricked. This wasn’t going to be a dreary point-by-point retelling of a film we already knew. This was going to be an entirely new story, only tangentially related to anything we’d seen before. The rug had been yanked out from underneath us, and it marked the precise moment when Fargo the TV series became an ongoing concern. It was a masterstroke.
Aside from the story, everything about Fargo felt like it had been polished and honed to within an inch of its life. Visually, it was confident and muscular – Oliver Platt’s shower sequence in episode three, in particular, will stay with me for years – and the score was operatic enough to inspire blind dread at the drop of a hat.
But where Fargo really excelled was in its casting. Bob Odenkirk was perfect as Saul Goodman’s better twin; a man of authority whose loose relationship with the truth this time stemmed from a wide-eyed fear of evil. Martin Freeman’s history of playing nice-guy everyman-observers such as Tim and Watson and Bilbo Baggins was the perfect facade for Nygaard’s slippery despicableness. Glenn Howerton got to play his It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia character for pathos for once. And in Allison Tolman, Fargo uncovered an out-and-out star; someone capable of matching Marge Gunderson pound for pound.
Fargo will return next year, telling a brand new story with a brand new cast. That’s obviously a risk, but Fargo clearly delights in taking your expectations and blasting them clean out of the sky. Series one only had to prove itself as the equal of the movie. But series two needs to be the equal of the last series. On the basis of what we’ve just seen, that’s going to be a much harder task.
