The third season of Fargo (Channel 4) ended with a cliffhanger, leaving its audience guessing as to whether good or evil, corruption or faith, would triumph. A masterful hour of television preceded it, as cinematic and ambitious as anything you might find on the big screen, filled with operatic lurches of plot and mood that left me feeling that I had witnessed something astonishingly good.
It is all bookended by Carrie Coon’s Gloria, who begins the episode almost resigning, and ends it debating with the devil. Coon is on a roll at the moment, having run away with the final season of The Leftovers, too. The intervention of Nikki, posing as Gloria and tipping off the IRS about Stussy’s unusual business arrangements, leads the real Gloria to figure out the entire and complicated puzzle. It is a credit to the show that it does not offer any immediate reward, instead presenting a five-year gap between Gloria realising what Varga (David Thewlis, always terrifyingly good at playing the creep, is on top form as the repulsive, grotty-toothed mastermind) has been doing, and actually getting her man.
Coincidences often make for lazy drama: the new season of Top of the Lake is suffering from an over-reliance on them, the way its characters are connected by blood and location and seemingly separate crimes all feeling a little too convenient. But Fargo embraces coincidences, no matter how farcical or how dire the consequences of just one strange twist may turn out to be. Small events have big results: Varga is undone by CCTV at first, then facial recognition technology later. The stripping of the business would have been legal, were it not for tax evasion. If the cop hadn’t turned up just as Emmit and Nikki were facing off, the cop and Nikki might not have ended each other’s days.
Ewan McGregor’s double-hander as both the doomed Ray and the endlessly dimwitted Emmit has been a pleasure to watch, and Emmit’s growing panic as his life catapults away from him translated into a brilliantly taut sense of impending doom. Despite that stamp being finally and ominously discarded in the driveway – it meant nothing, after all – he, too, had to wait five years for his fate. He seemed set for a happy ending, with his fortune stashed away and his family back together, but we were tricked: in the fridge, over a plate of jelly, Mr Wrench finished what Nikki began.
While sometimes gruesome in its over-the-top violence – the storage unit was straight out of a Tarantino film – Fargo is also very beautiful. The driving scenes, first in snow, and then in dust, are unfailingly gorgeous and vast. The scene in which the camera slowly drifts over first the policeman’s body, and then Nikki’s, is stunning and unsettling.
I loved, too, Fargo’s refusal to come up with a neat ending, instead leaving us in silence to work out whose version of the world is true. Is it Gloria’s, insistent that Varga will end up eating terrible food in jail for the rest of his days? Or is it Varga’s, certain that someone higher up will intervene to release him? I’m not optimistic.
This week’s The South Bank Show (Sky 1) focuses on the work of the TV writer Sally Wainwright. It’s a genuine treat for fans of Wainwright’s work and of television in general, as Melvyn Bragg spends much time peeling back the curtain to see how the wizards work their magic. This is partly a retrospective of Wainwright’s considerable career, starting at the present-ish, with how she came to write the BBC smash Last Tango in Halifax, before going back in time to her beginnings as a bus driver, then a writer for The Archers, Emmerdale, and her dream job, Coronation Street. There’s great archive footage of one of her episodes from 1994, in which Sarah Lancashire’s ditsy Raquel discusses Curly’s proposal, behind the bar.
Of course Lancashire ended up in both Last Tango and the outstanding Happy Valley, and one of the most fascinating parts of this hour sits Wainwright down with the police adviser who partly inspired the shape of Catherine Cawood. She describes how she was taught to approach a situation as if she was in charge, right down to the way she walks and puts on her hat. Wainwright’s obvious enthusiasm for the mechanics of storytelling is infectious, and HBO will jointly fund her next series, along with the BBC. Shibden Hall has been 16 years in the writing, and it’s surely HBO’s first foray into West Yorkshire – and a testament to Wainwright’s talent.
