Quirky ‘Fargo’ resets for Season 2
Series jumps ahead to the past with new cast, crime set in 1979
If it’s murder, manners and Minnesota, we must be heading back to Fargo.
The second edition of FX’s deadly drama has a new story, cast and time frame — 1979 — but the same creative soul in executive producer Noah Hawley, who is trying to re-create the offbeat, Minnesota-nice ethos of the Coen brothers’ iconic 1996 film.
“I think the dark comedy and putting these Midwestern people in these situations is what makes it so unique and funny,” says Kirsten Dunst, who plays Peggy Blumquist, a beautician whose life collides with this season’s falsely labeled “true” crime. With the second TV outing building on Hawley’s first, “I feel like now it’s become Noah’s own version” of the film’s spirit.
Peggy, married to butcher’s assistant Ed (Jesse Plemons), “hasn’t done the things she wanted to do. She wants to get out of Minnesota but doesn’t have the tools to do that,” Dunst says. Then, Peggy and Ed “get stuck in something, and they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Beyond the atmospheric DNA, both seasons feature Lou Solverson. The younger version of the diner owner played by Keith Carradine in the first series, which was set in 2006, is a Minnesota state trooper and Vietnam veteran (Patrick Wilson) who investigates a bloody murder scene that stains snowy Luverne, Minn.
Lou, who’s caring for his cancer-stricken wife and 6-year-old daughter, Molly (who grows up to be last season’s police investigator), senses a “moral compass” askew in the wake of the killings, Wilson says.
“I think there’s this sense of Lou coming back and seeing the atrocities of war and just not understanding why (such violence is) here. At this point in Lou’s life, he’s still looking for the good in people. There’s an optimism.”
The crime takes a bizarre twist, as Lou discovers with his father-in-law, local sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson). The trail eventually leads to a Fargo crime family led by matriarch Floyd Gerhardt.
Danson remembers sharing a common skepticism when the TV version was first announced. “I loved the movie. Why make a TV show?” However, after he “devoured” the Emmy-winning edition that featured Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman, he understood.
In the new season, “something startling happens in the first 10 minutes that you’ve completely forgotten about by the end of the episode because so many other things have happened that are mind-boggling,” he says.
Jean Smart, who plays Floyd, soaked in the ’70s sensibility. “I would get so tickled looking at the clothes. And the guys (with) those godawful hairdos and sideburns,” she says. “And, of course, my polyester pantsuits and turtlenecks and my little poodle haircut.”
Floyd has her hands full with three troubled sons and, more menacingly, a business-minded Kansas City Mob family expanding to the north. She and her husband “built an empire together, and the fact that it was illegal was kind of beside the point,” Smart says. “She’s a very practical person.”
Hawley sees a contrast between the Americas of 2006 and 1979: While the first season reflects an economic boom time when evil infects a small town, the second is set at “the lowest point in modern American history: post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, the economic recession, gas lines around the block, the failure of the Carter administration.”
Hawley wants to make the era more than a backdrop. “This was the tail end of a moment where a large number of disenfranchised groups thought they were going to get a seat at the table,” as reflected by Floyd’s rise, he says.
“Over all that, you have the specter of Ronald Reagan,” Hawley says. “He was about to come in and say: ‘Look, the American narrative is not that complicated. We’re Americans,’ and then sort of take us in another direction.”