‘Fargo’ Rock City: FX’s Miniseries Takes a Massive Second-Season Leap
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http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/fargo-rock-city-fxs-miniseries-takes-a-massive-second-season-leap/
A similar, traditional dynamic is afoot in Fargo’s second season, which turns the clock back to 1979, focusing on the “Sioux Falls incident” Lou Solverson mentioned to Lorne Malvo during a tense Season 1 standoff at the diner. Once again, a Solverson is a decent, dogged public servant tossed badge-first into a slush pile of organized crime and marital chaos. But this time Hawley isn’t obliged to carry any baggage but his own. Thus liberated, he unspools a fresh story that is razor-sharp and gleaming: Kansas City mafia goons — embodied by Brad Garrett and Bokeem Woodbine, equally terrific — are muscling in on the North Dakota territory controlled by the Gerhardts, a darkest-timeline Waltons led by stern matriarch Floyd (peerless Jean Smart) and short-tempered Dodd (merry Jeffrey Donovan). What appears to be a simmering if straightforward mob war is complicated when Rye, the youngest, dumbest Gerhardt, played by Kieran Culkin,3 goes rogue and winds up in a bloody pickle all his own involving a state judge, a Minnesota diner, and a small-town couple with big dreams (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst: terrific.)4 Soon enough, state trooper Lou (a heroic Patrick Wilson) is drawn in, along with his sheriff father-in-law, played with charismatic kindness by Ted Danson. Bullets fly, milkshakes are spilled, and, hey, overhead — is that a UFO?
Sure, the lines connecting all of these eccentrics appear a little loosey-goosey at first — and I haven’t even mentioned side players, like the conspiracy-theorizing mechanic played by Nick Offerman — but Hawley quickly draws them tighter than a lasso. Unlike last year, when Oliver Platt’s supermarket magnate ended up serving as little more than plot spackle, all the pieces here fit, even if a few screws remain blessedly loose. Instead of piggybacking on an oft-told tale, Hawley is instead Trojan horsing storytelling that we rarely see on television, even in this supposed Golden Age: In the Kansas City syndicate, with its dapper menace, there are shades of Donald Westlake’s Parker novels; in the slow-moving, near-mournful honor of Wilson and Danson, there are echoes of Elmore Leonard’s arid Westerns. And throughout it all is a pervasive, infectious sense of glee. I can’t really underline this point enough: Fargo is rich, gripping, and suspenseful. But it is also fun in a way that cable’s grim arbiters of taste rarely allow drama to be. Hitmen trade hair-washing tips, a man brandishing a cattle prod steps away from a fight to buy doughnuts. Fargo’s world is highly stylized, sure — or should I say “you betcha”? — but I find its essential good cheer, its refusal to drown out life’s quieter moments with the loudest, a thousand times more plausible than, say, True Detective’s perpetual macho frown.
The show’s look, always strong,5 takes a leap forward this year as well. Though still filmed in the depths of a Calgary winter, Fargo’s chilly vistas are sparked with all manner of jazzy visuals befitting the grimy, grindhouse decade in which it’s set: split screens that slide and click like Connect Four discs, dissolves that melt one scene into another like April snow. Is it surprising that a series based on old material can look so vital and new? Perhaps. In the wrong hands, an adaptation can be a license to coast.6 Here, though, it feels like permission to play: with camera angles, with emotions, with big shotguns and even bigger ideas. Does it say anything good about the state of TV that Fargo is one of the most original, joyful things on it? Not necessarily. But it says plenty of good things about Fargo.
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I have not anticatpated a season return like this since Breaking Bad. I think Jeffrey Donovan will be great.