I was on blogging hiatus during the first season of
Fargo. In the year since returning I haven't talked about the program a great deal, but if you're a regular reader (Hi, Dad!), you may have seen me make mention of the show and the Season 1 star, Allison Tolman. Hollywood, find this person work. She's great.
When the show came back on again this Fall, I didn't care to write about this season of
Fargo on an episode-by-episode basis. When writing about television with its weekly installments, with its endless trails of breadcrumbs leading you in to the next episode and into the next season, you wind up tallying plot points, punching holes, checking boxes and idly speculating. I do it here all the time when I talk TV.
But with programs like FX's Fargo in this new era of American television, we're getting a new form of the medium, something akin to the novel for motion pictures. Obviously, TV has grown and changed. In many corners its unrecognizable from the industry and story-telling I grew up with, and while I find the idea of "binging" a show kind of weird and self-defeating, I can understand the desire to move from chapter to chapter and stay up late to finish a good book.
Fargo the TV series was never going to be the film of the same name, and seemed a hugely risky endeavor, a tight-rope act of television. It was to be produced by the Coens, but that's code for: they'd get a check, but have no real participation. Instead, it was the creative vision of Noah Hawley, a guy who worked on Bones and some other shows, but who didn't seem to have made a name for himself, exactly. Few modern filmmakers are as highly regarded as the Coen Bros., and few have been as routinely successful in plunging into new territory, film after film. And while you can enjoy a Coen Bros. film upon a first viewing, they bear repeat viewings and never disappoint. And the Coen Bros. are prolific.
The movie of Fargo arrived in 1996 to well-deserved critical acclaim and solid box office. A noir-ish tale of avarice, crime, and human monsters with the soft glint of decency still living on the edges, painting the warm bed and the mundanities of life as a refuge - a good thing - in a world that has darkness always lapping at the edges. The film struck a chord with a wider audience than the Coen Bros. had previously enjoyed, even when the studios tried to push them front and center with Hudsucker Proxy. Sure, a lot of folks went to see the cop movie with the funny accents, but they wound up seeing a pretty good picture, too.
So what could we expect out of a TV show with a seeming lack of participation from the Coens?
