The strangely savoury acquired taste known as Fargo returns to FX on Monday night for its second season, with a new story, new cast and new time period but that same just-barely-askew take on the world. Violence, deadpan humour and observational oddity mix on this show in a way that no other current series quite matches — not Bates Motel, not Salem, not even that other FX curiosity, American Horror Story. Who else would set a tale in motion with a slaughter at a Waffle Hut?
Fargo is an anthology series, so the new season is free-standing, related to the first (and to the 1996 Coen Brothers movie) primarily by tone, although hard-core fans will enjoy spotting connecting character threads. Season 1 was set in 2006. Season 2 moves to 1979, but it’s always the ‘50s in Fargo — the bleached-out look; the neighbourly yet slightly stiff way that people, even husbands and wives, interact.
We are taken to Luverne, Minnesota, where 15 minutes into the premiere a triple homicide disrupts the Waffle Hut. (As in the earlier incarnations, Fargo, North Dakota, is more of a spectre than a setting; one of the victims, it turns out, was a judge there.) The killings have a connection to a Fargo crime family, and soon a couple who had nothing to do with any of it find themselves with a body-disposal problem. Because that’s the way things go in Fargo.
There’s a reason Season 1 won an Emmy for its casting: A significant part of the show’s allure is the way it puts name actors in roles that require actual acting of a sort the public might not associate with them. The familiar faces in Season 1 included Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman and Colin Hanks. The new season offers even more, with delicious results.
That unfortunate husband and wife who are caught up in a crime not of their making are played by Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons. Ted Danson is the sheriff, and Patrick Wilson is his son-in-law, a state trooper. The crime family’s matriarch is played by the always compelling Jean Smart. (She’s in a power struggle with one of her sons. Is that a nod to a certain Fox juggernaut when she tells him, “That’s what an empire is; it’s bigger than any son or daughter”?) Brad Garrett is a tough representing a Kansas City crime syndicate that wants to take over the territory.
Actors can never fully leave behind their signature roles, and it’s sweet to contemplate that the guy from Cheers, the guy from Friday Night Lights, the guy from Everybody Loves Raymond and the guy from the Broadway musical The Full Monty have all been sucked into the Fargo dimension.
And so has another famous name. What was going on in the world in 1979? Wasn’t that one-time movie star running for president of the United States? Ronald Reagan was his name, and, yes, he factors into what promises to be an entertaining season of this sublime series. Because that’s the way things go in Fargo.
