Grade: A
Before laughing at three Minnesota meat shop workers consecutively saying “OK then” in their nasally accents or chuckling at Patrick Wilson thinking the Military Industrial Complex meant war was, well, complex, let’s look at why “Fargo” is so fun.
The best way to look at “Fargo” is by comparing it to its counterpart “True Detective.” They were the two new inventive crime dramas that aired together spring 2014.
Season one of “True Detective” blew up and became everybody’s favorite new TV show. I enjoyed it but consistently stood in the “Fargo” corner, believing it to be the best show of 2014, and I eagerly awaited both season twos since both would follow a new storyline.
So as “True Detective” season two bombed and everybody turned on it, I couldn’t help but feel an odd vindication. But I still had to wait until Monday night to see which show would execute better.
By the moment I heard Kieran Culkin’s Rye Gerheardt tell his brother that saying he is a part of the family business is like “Jupiter telling Pluto it’s a planet,” I was back in.
The season-two premiere, “Waiting for Dutch,” already provides characters I want to follow and the same wit and beauty that made me fall for season one. What the original movie and showrunner Noah Hawley’s TV version seem to understand is that real life is not like the all-serious crime movies we normally see, but absurd crime stories still do happen.
I cannot help but keep comparing this to “True Detective,” which seems to subscribe to this film-style idea that a life of crime is constantly morose and bleak. Everyone is so damn serious and there is nothing allowing anyone to care about any characters.
“Fargo” takes the inverse of this idea to the extreme. It tells the story of overly farcical Midwesterners to tell a story that feels real instead of overly dramatic. But do not think this means the show is farcical. It’s intricate and suspenseful.
Yet the biggest differentiator for me between “True Detective” and “Fargo” is the shared concept of film-scale storytelling on television. That’s what people fell in love with “True Detective” for, but they might have fallen in love for the wrong reasons.
The trick that “Fargo” seems to understand is that prestige television is not done through big name actors and an expensive camera. It is accomplished through the execution of the storytelling.
The way the camera cuts to the door still swinging after a triple murder scene to display how quickly it all happened, or the shot of Jesse Plemons’ character’s flashlight going off and on as he walked down a dark hallway to build suspense. These moments make something special.
But let us not forget that beautiful wit. The characters seem worth investing in.
Like how Patrick Wilson’s Lou Solverson gets weirded out by the word “ejaculated” being in a children book he is reading to his daughter. That made me already like how innocent he is.
Also, the scale of this story seems more evident than last year’s. It took time for me to truly buy in to season one of “Fargo,” but it won me over. Season two is setting the stage already, and it is so much easier to jump in on.
