Fargo: Season 1 (2014)

One of several recent series to take their cues from a cult film classic, Fargo picks up the story of the suitcase some fifteen years later. Once again, we’re in the Scandinavian Midwest, and once again we’re presented with a complicated conspiracy of criminals and complicit bystanders – so complicated, in fact, that characters seem to slip in and out of main, supporting and guest status quite subliminally. For perhaps that reason, it’s populated by a host of fringe film actors, actors who never quite made it to the big screen, or are a little past their big-screen primacy, including Billy Bob Thornton, Colin Hanks, Oliver Platt, Martin Freeman and Bob Odenkirk, along with up-and-coming actress Alison Tolman in a career-making performance as a Bemidji police officer who doesn’t know her place. They all play it pretty broad, to the point where it sometimes feels a little like a caricature of the original film, which itself verged on self-caricature at key moments, if always reining it in with elegance and style. Still, the broadness isn’t just a matter of comedy – it’s what gravitates the series from thriller to horror, often approaching the tone and register of No Country For Old Men more than Fargo. That makes it feel quite timely – one of the recent trends in the late Golden Age of television has been to consider how horror might work as a longform genre, how suspense might be maintained over an entire season. In Fargo’s case, the answer is to make pretty much every encounter in the show feel longform – there’s at least a beat between every line, while characters will often freeze a facial expression for several seconds at a time. Given that most of the dialogue is bathetic, that makes for quite a disjunctive, unsettling tone that is suspenseful almost despite itself – like the characters themselves, so much of our experience of this Midwestern wasteland is spent micro-waiting that the actual set-piece and suspenseful climaxes raise waiting to a quite horrifying pitch. Even the end-point of the series is nebulous – it feels as if it could equally be an anthology series or a recurring narrative, overlaying everything with a kind of indefinite expectation of things coming to an end that creates quite a unique atmosphere of doom and dread, even or especially at its funniest and most light-hearted moments.