Fargo (C4) | All 4
Orange Is the New Black | Netflix
Broken (BBC1) | iPlayer
Ackley Bridge (C4) | All 4
Arena: American Epic (BBC4) | iPlayer
And so the grand tradition continues: plum American roles, wrestled for by only about 1.3 million homegrown actors with talent and native accents, go instead to a smart Brit who must take a year off to learn to speak slack-jawed Okie, or slow Minnesotan with heady diphthongs of Old Swede.
A warm welcome back to the chill land of Fargo, where small-town snowbound stupidity is forever being raised to an art form, where night-store clerks will perennially be asking a chirpy “now, what’s that now?” upon mishearing a stranger, before being either vouchsafed a head-scratching gobbet of ancient wisdom or shot in the face. Last time it was the sainted Martin Freeman as the rabbit in the headlights; now Ewan McGregor gets two chances, as both smoothie Emmit, parking-lot king of Minnesota, and his wronged loser brother Ray, all greasy combover and unforced errors.
The good news is, he excels in both. The easier job is Ray, with his borderline louche Corvette, and alluring parolee girlfriend Nikki Swango – AKA “the brunette with the nutcracker caboose” – and their joint devotion to both high-stakes bridge and keen amateur lawbreaking. Emmit is tougher – always hard to play hidden shallows – but promises greater conflicted subtleties. And it’s amazing what coloured contact lenses can achieve. Despite his facial good looks, had Mr McGregor possessed brown eyes and a hilarious poodle-perm in real life, I’m not sure he would have escaped a life pen-pushing for Crieff council.
There are elements, joyously, of both the previous series of the TV show and the preceding film, but also hints, intriguingly, of The Usual Suspects: most notably in David Threlfall’s resemblance to Pete Postlethwaite, and a back-story of foul eastern European slayings. Fargo and Suspects: if you have to echo two films, you could do worse, but this is very much its own (and Noah Hawley’s) proud standalone creation. Despite a too-slow opening episode, it’s now settled to a taut thrum of wit, blood, intrigue and what Nikki likes to call “unfathomable pinheadery”: 10 glorious weeks await.
As do 13 new episodes, as of now, of Orange Is the New Black, which ended series four with hearts in mouths and the ladies of Litchfield, armed with a guard’s gun, poised to take over the asylum. American critics have grizzled that it’s a mistake to set this series only over three days, the timespan of the uprising: I thoroughly disagree.
Rather, the change of pace allows us more usefully to explore not only the inmates’ (thoroughly disparate) backstories, but also the ways in which they react to temporarily ruling the roost with wildly varying (and surprising, given those backstories) degrees of swagger, fear, need, charm and racial hatred. After wilfully setting my stupid head against the cultishness of this show, I am a sudden and thorough convert. Frieda Berlin looks, belatedly, to be about to step into her twilight limelight, excelling as the 1950s girl-scout gone toxically wrong thanks to a survivalist father. This show, gobby and visceral, can reveal astoundingly much, encapsulated in simple lines such as those following debate over whether to take a prison visitor’s shoes: “Maybe, to use the heels for weapons. But not to wear. They represent the patriarchy and the oppression of women. And they hurt like fuck.” Vicious, phlegmatic, feminist, funny, poignant: you can drink yourself silly on its many perfumes.
Despite standout performances from Anna Friel and Sean Bean, there is something of a one-perfume topnote to Broken: misery. That is not, necessarily, to detract from Jimmy McGovern’s tale of a sort-of-Manchester, focusing on the woes of a beleaguered northern priest, and the white lies he has to tell absolutely everybody, and the grey lines they write on his once-Sharpe face.
McGovern is too adept a writer to indulge himself in agitprop: only very occasionally, and perhaps rightly so, as in Father Michael’s railing against “four betting shops in the high street. No bank, no post office, no chemist…” do we feel we are in lefty hands. And he makes magnificent, true, points about cash-poverty, as opposed to not poverty-poverty. It starts with Nina Simone’s powerfully beautiful I Think It’s Going to Rain Today: the problem is that the rain never stops.
Broken was held back for a week, a little inexplicably, because of the Manchester bomb. I’m not sure in what ways Ackley Bridge, C4’s hopeful new thing about the merging of two schools, Muslim and lilywhite, thinks it is addressing the problems that might later lead to such unconscionable actions – as far as I could see, the two bestie friends, white and Asian, ended up rather nastily estranged purely through forcible integration.
Part of the problem was that I only half believed the acting: the youngsters, chiefly Poppy Lee Friar and Amy-Leigh Hickman, acted the cotton socks off a tired teaching staff of cliched soap stalwarts, and this might have been better suited to a more pupil-focused tale. I think it’s a dud, and will capture neither teen hearts nor 8pm Brookie fans. But what do I know? Last time I looked I wasn’t a hormone-fuelled, 16-year-old northern virgin. Nope, just looked again.
The final episode in American Epic, a wonderful Arena series, saw musicians of the calibre of Jack White, Los Lobos, Elton John, Taj Mahal and the late Merle Haggard gather round what looked like a giant steampunk espresso machine: engineer Nick Bergh’s recreation of the 1926 recording behemoth that travelled around the US to vitally capture, in brass and leather and oiled springs, the many legacies of folk, country, blues, steel guitar. Everyone who has ever been even the tiniest bit interested in music should watch this. Three minutes for the 112lb weight that drove the cutting lathe to lower, one take was all you got, with no post-production flattery, and I have to say all acquitted themselves phenomenally. The series was an eight-year work for Bergh, and for producers Bernard MacMahon, Allison McGourty and Robert Redford: while we wait yet for an overwhelming love of Labour, there remain glorious labours of love.
