Bloodbaths and flying saucers! This thriller’s like Cluedo on LSD
OK THEN. Fans of cryptic television can spend the next ten weeks puzzling out Fargo (C4), a murder thriller that consists entirely of obscure quotations, allusions, violent shocks and visual puns.
This is not a whodunit. The one thing that’s unambiguously clear in this spin-off from the Oscar-winning movie of the same name is that the killer was a small-time gangster, high on cocaine topped up with coffee and sugar. And now he’s dead.
The mystery of Fargo is more the existential kind, in the tradition of intellectual crime dramas such as Twin Peaks; artfully constructed to make viewers knit their brows and mutter: ‘What the blue blazes is that supposed to mean?’
Either you’ll relish this as tantalising mental stimulation, or you’ll think it’s insufferably pretentious. I’m veering towards the latter, but then, I never had the patience for cryptic crosswords either.
Take the murder scene, set in a snowy Minnesota landscape during the late Seventies. The thug, Rye Gerhardt, played by Macauley Culkin’s little brother Kieran, turns up at a diner and sits for about 20 uneventful minutes, sipping coffee — one more unmistakable reference to Twin Peaks.
Just when you’ve decided that this is the TV equivalent of still life and nothing will ever happen (like that hour-long film, by artist Sam TaylorWood, of David Beckham sleeping), it all gets very weird and gory.
A local judge starts telling Bible stories and squirts the gangster in the eyes with fly spray. The gangster shoots her, and the chef who attacks him with a frying pan and the waitress.
The dying judge stabs him with a steak knife. The hoodlum kills her, and staggers outside to finish off the wounded waitress.
So far, then, it’s just a typical evening in a budget American restaurant. But then a UFO appears, three immense floodlights slowly rotating in the sky, staring down like an alien god.
As it zooms away, leaving the gangster gaping, a car slithers out of control on the icy highway and speeds off with his body spreadeagled on the bonnet.
Perhaps it’s all terribly meaningful and significant. But the whole sequence felt like a game of Cluedo on LSD: it was Professor Plum, with the Flying Saucer and the Fly Spray, in the Snowy Wastes.
Pseudo-profound television will always attract A-list actors, eager to look intelligent. The hit-and-run driver was Kirsten Dunst, and the grizzled old cop investigating the murders was Ted Danson.
This story is set 30 years before the first series of Fargo, and the only characters who connect the two eras are idealistic local policeman Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) and his little daughter Molly, who, Fargo fans will remember, grows up to be a law enforcer herself.
They all talk in that lilting, folksy accent with a Scandanavian inflection, cheerfully parroting: ‘OK then,’ ‘Ya know,’ ‘Sure!’ The implication is that though these people sound dumb, they’re smart enough to work out what’s going on. Which, ya know, sure makes them a darn sight cleverer than me.
The English equivalent could be the leaden, South-Eastern vowels of 33-year-old Cheryl Prudham, who says things like: ‘I will not have nobody dictate to me how many children I have,’ and still possesses the low cunning to extract around £800 a week in tax-free benefits from the welfare system.
She boasted for an hour in Britain’s Most Shameless Mum (C5) of the expensive holidays and presents showered on her family of 12 semi-feral brats (by three different fathers). Cheryl was happy to be filmed as she lied to her children’s teachers to avoid truancy fines, and complained like mad when her boyfriend, a pizza delivery moped rider, came home without a stolen double-cheese-and-salami for her.
Her six-year-old got a £450, petrolpowered mini- quad bike for his birthday, and went tearing around the local playing fields with his toddler sister riding pillion. Their heavily pregnant mother sucked on her cigarette and cackled like a witch.
Cheryl thinks she’s a celebrity, and this vile documentary treated her like one. She behaves as though she’s untouchable, entitled to take anything she wants, treating the welfare state as an all-you-can-eat buffet. And the sickening thing is that we let her.