In Hawley’s hands, Fargo has become top TV series of 2015
Creator shows fearlessness in building on Coen universe
Fargo’s second season is over, but many of us remain mesmerized by it, as if we were flat on our backs staring up at a UFO.
In the midst of the TV industry’s creative and cultural peak, the Calgary-produced show slipped onto the scene and quietly, steadily propelled itself up critics’ best-of lists. The first season of creator Noah Hawley’s anthology for FX was tremendous in its own right — it effortlessly shrugged off any expectations viewers had in connection with Joel and Ethan Coen’s iconic 1996 film — but Fargo’s second season is even better.
In fact, for my money, and with due respect to Game of Thrones and The Affair, Season 2 of Fargo was the best series of 2015. Because where HBO’s far more hyped True Detective tried and failed to build on a first season of acclaim due to rote caricature and ham-fisted writing, Fargo succeeded by using snippets of multiple dramatic constructs to assemble a firstrate, postmodern pastiche that felt familiar and fresh all at once.
In Season 1, Hawley wove elements of the Fargo movie into his plot, paying homage to the Coen Bros.’ genius at nearly every turn. Hawley continued the paeans to the Coens in Season 2, but in moving the focus of the series back more than a quarter-century, he also had to fill in the histories of characters from Season 1 while crafting a bigger story arc than can be told in a single season.
To help get there and give the TV version of Fargo a life of its own, Hawley created unforgettable standalone roles in Season 2 with no connection to the tale that preceded it.
There was the Gerhardt crime family (including Jean Smart as the matriarch, Jeffrey Donovan as the bullheaded first heir and Angus Sampson as the burly, surly middle child with embers of decency still alive in him); Gerhardt enforcer and native American badass Hanzee Dent ( Longmire’s Zahn McClarnon); the mundane, wedded duo of Peggy and Ed Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst and Friday Night Lights’ Jesse Plemons); and world-weary Kansas City hit man Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine).
Each had a crucial place in the plot’s house of cards; never did you get the sense (as you did in True Detetctive’s second season) that scenes had to be divided equally among the major stars. Instead, you can’t imagine Season 2 of Fargo without any of them.
The end result of Hawley’s brilliant splicing process intentionally blurred the lines between the movie and the first two seasons — a third season is scheduled for the spring of 2017 — and between objective and subjective reality. Original characters moved in and out of the spotlight next to those with links to the movie and Season 1 (most notably, policeman Lou Solverson, played by Patrick Wilson). And even the appearance late in Season 2 of, shall we say, an otherworldly presence, was accepted and half-shrugged-off as an understandable occurrence.
Fargo’s TV life has numerous layers — some grounded in reality, others lyrical and existential — and viewers embrace all of them because Hawley makes clear they’re being told a story. One episode of Season 2 is narrated by a Season 1 actor/character and that character is reading from a book titled The History of True Crime in the Midwest.
Hawley isn’t winking at his viewers; he’s staring at them and telling a story in as straightforward a manner as possible. Just like you’d expect from one of the earnest midwesterners who populate Fargo.
But perhaps the most self-aware element of Fargo’s superb second season was its use of music. Hawley and series music supervisor Maggie Phillips didn’t simply choose songs used in the Coens’ movies (including The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing and O Brother, Where Art Thou?), they chose cover versions that infused them with new life and meaning.
In a fundamental way, Hawley is doing the same thing with Fargo. He’s singing the rough outline of a song, retaining its essential structure and melodies, but transforming it with his own inflections to convey something altogether original. Even in its biggest moments of déjà vu, the second season of Fargowas different. There’s a fearlessness at play here that flies in the face of the mammoth challenge that is adapting a work of art from visionaries such as the Coens, but Hawley is proving to be an artistic leviathan in his own right.
As he uses Fargo to tap-dance between generations and inspirations, his Gene Kelly-worthy performance is a master class in making something greater than the sum of multisourced parts.