Something bizarre happened in the fourth season of Fargo, way back in 2020—they forgot to write a good story. The cast and the production were top-notch, on a level with the best the series had offered previously (how can a show with Chris Rock and Timothy Olyphant fail?), but the entire plot was a shocking, sprawling bore. Three years and a pandemic have intervened, and with the release of the fifth season this month, the big question was how Noah Hawley and his team would respond (or perhaps recover) from the whiff that came before.
The answer, and the headline, is that they got really weird with it. Even by Fargo standards—in success and failure, this has always been one of TV’s oddest shows—this season gets to a strange place quickly and stays there, unbothered, for the entire run of the six episodes made available to critics. If the quintessential theme of Fargo, starting with the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece, is the darkness of man juxtaposed with the exaggerated “niceness” and simplicity of midwestern America, the two oppositional aspects setting each other off in vibrant relief, here we spend less time than ever on surface appearances before reaching the dark underbelly… which we see immediately in a vicious brawl at a PTA meeting.
All of this, somehow, works.
A small example of the oddities we encounter: we’re inundated with Minnesota accents at the start, as you would expect, but when we meet Lorraine, the matriarch of the Lyon family, she is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh with a voice that sounds like the female version of a villainous east coast robber baron from the 1890s, perhaps with a slight British affectation. There is not, as far as I can tell, a lick of Midwestern in it, nor is there any explanation for why she speaks this way when everyone around her, including her softie son, is about as aw-shucks Minnesota as they come.
Briefly, it feels like Lorraine will be the show’s dominant figure, but if you make that mistake as I did, it’s because you overlooked her daughter-in-law Dorothy Lyon (yes, there are more than a few Wizard of Oz references here). She’s a prim-and-prop Midwestern mama to all appearances, despite some trouble at the outset, until suddenly she’s not. To say more would be to spoil what is a very intriguing plot, so I’ll say instead that Juno Temple is spectacular as Dorothy, and by spectacular I mean “convincingly sociopathic,” with both her surface propriety and her shocking facility with the dark arts serving to paint the picture of a woman whose psychology is resilient, mysterious, and pretty terrifying.
The cast keeps delivering. We don’t truly meet Jon Hamm until Episode 2, but when we do, his Sheriff Roy Tillman springs vividly to life. He’s a younger, cooler combination of Ammon Bundy and Joe Arpaio, with a sprinkle of Christian fundamentalism and sexual perversion mixed in. Trust me, you won’t be able to look away. For reasons that stretch back decades, he’s on the lookout for Dorothy, and despite his usual aura, there is a Draper-esque sense of desperation beneath the surface. Hamm proves yet again that nobody embodies both the American masculine ideal, and its frightened psyche, better than him.
The two of them alone would make for a compelling show by themselves, but because this is Fargo, with its inclination for ensembles, we also get to watch Dave Foley play Lorraine’s legal mastermind, a character who continues the show’s tradition of magnificent names: Danish Graves. Joe Keery is equally terrific as the near-psychopath Gator Tillman, Sheriff Roy’s mean but slightly less competent son, and up and down the roster, there’s not a bad performance. The weirdest, though, belongs to Ole Munch, the latest in a long line of Fargo monsters, played with peak creepiness by Sam Spruell. Spruell is no stranger to the villain role, but this has to be the first one who dresses in an old English smock, and whose origins seem to be almost mythological. What’s brilliant about Munch is that he’s cast as a wild card, in contrast to earlier versions; it’s never entirely clear whose side he’s on, only that he’s going to sow destruction at every turn.
Despite this laundry list of great characters, what differentiates this season from the last is that the writers are telling a more intimate story. It’s ridiculous in several facets, but the absurdity has a way of contributing to, not detracting from, that intimacy. The characters become more riveting with each twist, and by the third episode, you barely even blink an eye when a show set entirely in 2019 suddenly brings you back to 1500’s Wales.
It’s also somewhat nice that, despite being set in the suburban Midwest, there are fewer clueless morons than in past installations; by my count, only one. Everyone has an angle here, nobody is really “good,” and the confluence of selfish interests, dark pasts, and extremely personal ambitions manage to create a nice metaphor for modern America. Of course, you don’t really need the metaphor; the story and the acting (and the music, which I haven’t yet mentioned but is tonally perfect) is plenty to carry you along. We learned in the last season that a bad plot can take even the best of casts, and Hawley seems to have taken that lesson to heart. He’s back, so is Fargo, and we can once again delight in that frigid, bizarre, and impossibly portentous world.
Fargo Season 5 premieres Tuesday, November 21st on FX and streaming on Hulu.
Shane Ryan is a writer and editor. You can find more of his writing and podcasting at Apocalypse Sports, and follow him on Twitter here .
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