First episode was this week.
10 segment series.
Nothing to do with the original film but the Coens are weaving stuff brilliantly.
Fargo, the TV series, premiering Tuesday night on FX, begins exactly like Fargo, the 1996 Coen brothers film upon which it is based: with a series of title cards that lie to us. “This is a true story,” they read. “At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.” This is the sort of deadpan, macabre tone that suffuses the film, a darkly comic confrontation between total decency and total depredation—best encapsulated by the movie’s most famous scene, Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) finding a professional killer (Peter Stormare) shoving Steve Buscemi’s leg down a wood chipper.
The TV show, which is being imagined as an anthology series like True Detective or American Horror Story with each season telling a contained story, is set in the same universe as the film both thematically and literally. What happened in the movie happened in the world of the series, and here we are, years later, in the Minnesota town of Bemidji, following a cast of Midwesterners who are much, much less polite than they seem.
The Coens gave the project their blessing, and in exchange got a producer credit, but they have had nothing to do with the particulars of the series, all 10 episodes of which have been written by Noah Hawley (whose previous credits include Bones and the very short-lived ABC series My Generation). Fargo the series skimps on decency to revel in the depredation. Hawley, speaking to the New York Times, described the show as “No Country for Old Fargo,” and this is, unfortunately I think, accurate: It is Fargo infested with the spirit of Anton Chigurh instead of Marge Gunderson, as if metaphysical and brutal violence was an underused ingredient in quality TV, instead of the overserved main course.