My Love-Hate Relationship With 'Fargo,' A Show That Never Lets You Forget That It's Doing An Art

I keep watching this show even though it drives me insane. Help?

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FX

[Yes, this will contain spoilers for Fargo season 5]

Let me preface this by saying that, even in the age of “prestige TV” and TV shows worth writing about in general, the truest test of any show is whether you keep watching. And with Fargo on FX, I’ve watched all five seasons and will probably watch the next one. The Wire had five seasons total. That’s an incredible run, no matter how you slice it, and no matter what I say about it below, my subconscious has already awarded it a de factor passing grade over my constant objections.

Fargo, the 1996 Coen Brothers movie, began with an opening title card: “This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. 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.”

There have been various attempts to figure out which “true story” Fargo was referring to, and various aspects of the film were taken from some real-life crimes. For the most part though, the title card was a conceit, a bit of a troll. Some true events, wholly invented characterizations — mostly the usual “based on a true story” deal. As Joel Coen said in 1997, “If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept.”

Later, in 2015, he admitted, “as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it's a story.”

Basically, the original title card seems to have been a very 1996 way of toying with how an audience receives a story if you give them the plausible deniability that it’s “true.” Fargo on FX has begun every episode (episode, not just season) with the same title card, only changing the year and the place, depending on that season’s setting. This despite each season, often creakingly so, having at least one “supernatural element” — a spaceship, a time-traveling sin eater, a reincarnated character, etc.

It’s always bugged me that they keep recycling the same conceit, divorced from its cultural context, and mostly without purpose or payoff. Almost 30 years removed from the Fargo movie, with the idea of truth in storytelling having been degraded in countless ways, what does this title card even accomplish anymore? It could be a way of taking the Coens’ idea further in some way, of toying with true crime conventions or the rise of the docuseries somehow, but mostly it seems to just be there out of habit. It broadcasts “WE’RE DOING A THING” without further exploration or justification.

That seems to be Fargo’s MO in general, and part of what seems to constantly annoy me about it. It makes a lot of big dramatic choices that don’t seem to offer much beyond the conspicuous appearance of making big dramatic choices. I inevitably end up remembering its showy construction as much as the story.

Fargo’s latest season concerns a “constitutional sheriff” played by Jon Hamm, his “escaped” wife played by Juno Temple, the immortal Sin Eater played by Sam Spruell, some FBI agents, the escaped wife’s mother in law and “Queen of Debt” (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and two small-town cops (Lamorne Morris and Richa Moorjani). The plot has a lot of moving parts, and maybe the act of watching the writers try to juggle it all is part of what keeps me watching. But, like always, a few of those parts seem to exist more out of habit and formula than for any particular narrative reason.

Another representive example of the Fargo formula: Early in the season, I tweeted about them needing a golf consultant after this scene showing Lukas Gage’s comically terrible golf swing. He looks like he’s never swung a golf club before and probably hasn’t (and honestly, good for him — I am a golfer myself, but I recognize that it’s mostly an ugly, destructive habit, like chain-smoking, that I just can’t quit).

The tweet about a golf consultant was mostly a joke, and an excuse to post video of actors-looking-incompetent-at-sports, which is a topic I’ve always enjoyed. The tweet went sort of viral and even got picked up by some golf meme Instagram accounts. Any tweet that gets more than 300 or so favs mostly just floods your mentions with unwanted bad replies, and most of the worst ones for this were from people explaining to me that the golf swing was meant to be a joke and wondering how stupid I could possibly be to miss it.

It may indeed have been a “joke” in some sense, but it’s the kind of joke more at the expense of the material than in service of it. In the scene, Gage’s character says “I’m so close. I came in second at Hilton Head.”

Later on in the season it does come out that Gage’s character is sort of deluded and that this golf dream of his is just another in a long line of character flaws that his long-suffering wife continues to suffer. Fine, it’s just the level of the delusion that’s hard to square. It’s the equivalent of him saying “I’m hoping to get invited back to Timberwolves training camp this year,” and the putting up a jumper that misses the backboard by two feet.

It would be obvious to basically anyone with eyes that this guy isn’t coming in second in any tournament, so is she just letting it slide that he’s referencing something that never happened? In order for this to work, they either both have to be mentally challenged or she has to be okay with having married a mentally challenged man. Moreover, if the rub is that he’s a little delusional but she accepts it (which seems to have been the goal) the scene still works fine if he has a competent-looking golf swing, while raising far fewer questions that only take you out of the scene. Why does Fargo constantly want to be a cartoon? It’s constantly sabotaging otherwise fine scenes and subplots with these weird choices.

Consider also Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. Leigh plays Lorraine Lyon, Dorothy Lyon’s (Juno Temple) wealthy mother-in-law known as “the Queen of Debt” (probably a shot at ghoulish former Secretary of Education Betsy Devos). Lorraine’s character arc takes her from disapproving mother-in-law, who at first wishes her gentle son played by David Rysdahl had married someone a little less low rent, but eventually comes to realize that Dorothy’s aw shucks PTA mom act is just a cover, and comes to champion her out of a combination of familial love and female solidarity. It’s a perfectly enjoyable storyline, or it would be, if not for Leigh playing Lorraine with the most disastrous accent since Jodie Foster in Elysium.

Leigh, otherwise a competent and enjoyable actor, plays Lorraine with some kind of affected hybrid of southern debutante and mid-Atlantic radio presenteer, despite the character being a Minnesotan (Leigh says she based Lorraine on William F. Buckley, partly at Hawley’s urging, which… sure). It’s as hard on the ears as Carey Mulligan in Maestro, and at least Mulligan executed her grating accent consistently. Leigh’s accent constantly slips in and out, like she’s playing the lead in a high school stage production of Gone with the Wind. It made me dread every Leigh scene in Fargo. And again, what was the upside? How did it help the story?

This season mostly takes the form of an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between Jon Hamm’s Roy Tillman (despite his much publicized forays into comedy, I still think Hamm is at his best playing scowling assholes) and his runaway ex-wife, played by Juno Temple (who is fantastic, as she always seems to be). Things come to a head in the final episode, which takes the form of a Ruby Ridge-esque showdown between Roy and his acolyte nationalists on one side, and the Feds, in conjunction with Troopers Wit Farr and Scandia Deputy Indira Olmstead on the other, with Dorothy being held captive at the ranch.

Trooper Farr, duty bound to rescue Dorothy after she saved his life in the shootout in the first episode, eventually encounters Roy in an underground tunnel. Farr, with his pistol drawn, tells Roy to drop his knife multiple times but doesn’t shoot, presumably in an effort to deny Roy the martyr’s death Roy seems to want. Roy eventually fake drops the knife and stabs Farr in the heart, killing him. We come away thinking Farr was a noble idiot, and, in a show that seems to so often strive for “torn from the headlines” (the constitutional sheriff, the queen of debt, the standoff between feds and pseudo-cultists) we end with a scene that leaves us thinking that boy, cops should really stop pussyfooting around and kill more people, shouldn’t they? I don’t want to be the good politics police when it comes to arts criticism, but bad politics in service of a throwaway story element is something else. Mostly I just don’t buy it.

The season’s final sequence is a faceoff between Dorothy, thinking she’s finally escaped Roy and won a safe, suburban happy ending for her husband and daughter, and the mysterious drifter, Munch (Sam Spruell). Munch, with his bowl cut and kilt, is initially teased and eventually confirmed as 500-year-old “sin eater” from Wales who has come to finish the job he was hired for, even though the guy who hired him (Roy) stiffed him and his now in prison. Mostly though, he seems to do a lot of talking, as if he’s trying to convince Dorothy why he should kill her instead of killing her.

“One day a man comes on a wealthy horse, and offers him two coins and a meal,” Munch says. “But the food was not food. It was sin. The sins of the rich. Greed, envy, disgust. They were bitter, the sins. But he ate them all, for he was starving. From then on, a man does not sleep or grow old. He cannot die. He has no dreams. All that is left is…sin.”

“It feels like that, I know,” Dorothy says. “What they do to us. Make us swallow. Like it’s our fault. But you wanna know the cure? You gotta eat something made with love and joy, and be forgiven.”

Munch takes a bite of Dot’s Bisquik biscuit, and the camera pulls in on Munch’s face as he attempts a smile. Roll credits.

So… was this a show about the 500-year-old sin eater? Did we even need this character? And yet Munch’s is the face we’re left with, after an overwrought monologue delivered excruciatingly slowly.

Ah, Fargo. They’ll never let you forget that they’re doing an art, even if they’re less clear and what that art actually says. It’s the most infuriating show on television. I can’t wait to bitch about it again in two years.