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‘Fargo’ Rock City: FX’s Miniseries Takes a Massive Second-Season Leap «

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‘Fargo’ Rock City: FX’s Miniseries Takes a Massive Second-Season Leap «

*Fargo*, FX’s Emmy-winning anthology series, returns for a second season at
10 p.m. ET on Monday, October 12. And it’s good. It’s so, so good. The only
thing stopping me from saying it’s *great* is (a) a Midwestern humility
that befits the subject matter, and (b) that I’ve only seen four episodes.
Trust me when I say I’m counting the days until I can see more. In a
moment, I’ll tell you more about Season 2’s remarkable cast, its mastery of
style and tone, and the great joy I felt in watching every frame of it.
But, in a nod to the digressive storytelling tradition made famous by the
Coen brothers’ movie some 19 years ago, I’d like to start telling you about
*Fargo* by telling you about something else entirely. And it’s this:

A few days ago, CBS announced plans to develop a TV series based on *Nancy
Drew, *the 85-year-old mystery series about a girl in a cloche
investigating missing clocks
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/83/Origndtsotoc.jpg/220px-Origndtsotoc.jpg>.
(Stay with me. We’ll get there.) Or at least, that’s how I remember *Nancy
Drew* from the spinner racks at school libraries. The Deadline story
<http://deadline.com/2015/10/cbs-drama-series-nancy-drew-book-series-1201567695/>
about the project, however, says the proposed series will center on an NYPD
detective who “investigates and solves crimes using her uncanny
observational skills, all while navigating the complexities of life in a
modern world.” It doesn’t take a world-class teen sleuth to realize that
this new *Nancy Drew* isn’t as much inspired by the source material as it
is by everything else currently on the airwaves — at least the shows that
aren’t about Naval officers investigating murders and/or gumbo
<http://www.entertainmentwallpaper.com/images/res1920x1080/movie/tv-ncis-new-orleans01.jpg>.
CBS isn’t buying a timeless idea so much as it’s investing in a famous name.

Perhaps I’m being overly cynical. Maybe *The Mysteries of Nancy Drew*
<http://pics.filmaffinity.com/The_Mysteries_of_Laura_TV_Series-522622026-large.jpg>
will be really good.1 The verdict on that will be rendered next fall,
should the project make it all the way to series. But the fact remains that
CBS’s North Star isn’t the Emmy-winning *The Good Wife*, it’s *Elementary*,
another modern reinterpretation of a graying property. And why not? *Elementary
*is a money-printing hit, able to be exported to countries around the
world. The network’s biggest hit this fall is *Limitless
<http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/nzt-4ever-the-limitless-tv-show-is-finally-here-to-unlock-our-smart-drug-craving-minds/>*,
based on the movie. Its best pilot? *Supergirl*
<http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/2015-fall-tv-preview-burn-it-all-down/>,
based on the comic. In the spring, both will be joined by *Rush Hour*
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Hour_(U.S._TV_series)>, based on Chris
Tucker’s bank statement <http://www.popmatters.com/column/posner051213/>.

Welcome to television’s great Xerox Age, in which brands are more valuable
than ideas, and awareness carries more water than affection does. That
sounds bad, but it doesn’t have to be. Because while it’s true that a great
majority of the cynical franchise extensions masquerading as television
shows fail and fail hard — either creatively, commercially, or, in the
unhappy case of Fox’s *Minority Report*
<http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/ratings-minority-report-falls-blindspot-strong-1201611332/>,
both — a surprising number of them work. Both *Parenthood* and *Friday
Night Lights* found ways to deepen and enrich previously realized worlds.
Netflix’s *Daredevil
<http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/giving-the-devil-his-do-rag-why-netflixs-daredevil-is-the-least-marvel-y-marvel-property-yet/>*
and the CW’s *The Flash*
<http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/fall-tv-season-fox-ratings-cbs-nbc-shonda-rhimes/>
are smart, engaged reimaginings of characters who each are older than CBS’s
core audience. The truth is, good television can bloom from nearly any
seed, no matter how dusty. That’s because, unlike other mediums, TV plays
the long game. The goal isn’t always to make the most beautiful flower. The
goal is to keep the flower alive for as long as possible.

What *Fargo* does is suggest a third way: Buy some fertile soil from
somebody else and then seed it with all manner of delightful, idiosyncratic
strangeness. Not that this was obvious from the start. When FX first
announced the project, in 2012, I dismissed it as yet another calculating
bit of corporate flimflammery: a network afraid to invest in something new,
an industry with nothing left to say. What actually happened was something
far cannier. By green-lighting a high-profile adaptation, FX boss John
Landgraf was indeed bowing to the new reality of the business: In a buyers’
market for serialized storytelling, no one but HBO is shelling out millions
to an untested writer with a clever idea for a mystery — and after the
debacle that was *True Detective* Season 2
<http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/true-detective-season-2-episode-8-omega-station/>,
there’s an argument to be made that no one should be doing it, full stop.2
But by encouraging the adaptor, novelist turned showrunner Noah Hawley, to
take his cues from the freewheeling spirit of the movie instead of its
actual story beats, Landgraf provided his network with the rarest of flora:
an innovative, exciting crime franchise that, from nearly the moment it
arrived, felt like an old friend.

[image: Fargo-1]Chris Large/FX

Note that I said “nearly.” Even with the benefit of hindsight, I’d argue
that the first season’s
<http://grantland.com/features/fargo-fx-billy-bob-thornton-review/> tenuous
connection to the Coen brothers’ 1996 masterpiece was more curse than
blessing. In its opening installments, the series performed a complex sort
of creative karaoke, bogarting the movie’s unique hot dish of Minnesota
nice and murderous noir but seasoning it with all new characters and
situations. I didn’t love the pilot, mainly because it appeared to be
trying so much harder than William H. Macy in an auto dealership
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4Je2WxsqWA>. And, in retrospect, why
wouldn’t it? The task was one worthy of Paul Bunyan
<http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RzA8uP0ofMU/Toz-b1gaHSI/AAAAAAAAIzs/l6qHPt0uZ8M/s1600/Fargo_033Pyxurz.jpg>.
Hawley was attempting to ape (but not copy) the inimitable Coen brothers
while simultaneously trying to distinguish himself as an auteur and his
project as a viable, audience-grabbing concern. It’s a surprise the
screeners didn’t arrive drenched in flop sweat.

About three hours in, though, the ratio of imitation to innovation began to
reverse. By the end of the season, *Fargo* was enchanting entirely on its
own terms. Allison Tolman’s Molly Solverson wasn’t appealing because she
reminded us of Marge Gunderson; she was appealing because of the way she
did her job and the quiet fierceness with which she loved her father, Lou,
and her eventual husband, Gus. The Coen brothers tend to look at normalcy
askance, as if life were a long, cruel joke best spent cringing in
anticipation of the punch line. Hawley relied on a more simplisic worldview
— outside the home, evil lurks like a wolf; inside, a warm fire burns — but
it’s one I’d argue is more attuned to the naturally comforting rhythms of
weekly television and one that, when done right, can be extremely
satisfying. It’s not worth worrying about subverting crime fiction on TV
when so few have been able to master it in the first place.

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 <https://vimeo.com/131477918> 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
<https://40.media.tumblr.com/4d75b349ab5ebeb21bfaa595df568a26/tumblr_n8q9kyyTrB1tuk5flo1_250.jpg>
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
<http://grantland.com/features/donald-westlake-man-created-parker-quest-perfect-character/>;
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*.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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