The previous four seasons of Fargo – the anthology series which used the 1996 Coen brothers’ movie as a foundation to Midwest crime stories delivered as dark and bloody comedies – have proved that film spin-offs don’t have to be knock-offs. And that they don’t necessarily have to stick to one film.
The fourth season from 2020, with its warring crime families in 1950s Kansas City, Missouri, felt as much of a homage to the Coens’ mobster movie Miller’s Crossing and had characters who tied into season two, set in 1979.
Judging by early episodes of the forthcoming fifth season, there is an amusing, you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it touch of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, their Oscar-winning adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.
But Noah Hawley, who created the acclaimed anthology with little input from the duo but with an expert ear for their tone, has also delivered a Fargo show that might be the closest he’s got to the original film, albeit in a script-flipped kind of way.
The film had car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) arranging to have his wife kidnapped, only for it all to go horribly wrong, the crime solved by the fearless and heavily pregnant Marge Gunderson, played by Frances McDormand.
There’s another kidnapping of a car dealer’s wife near the beginning of the new show, which, like the movie, leads to violence after the abductors are pulled over at night on an empty highway by local law enforcement officers.
But in this case, the abductee isn’t the helpless victim she was in the film. She’s Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, and while it may appear she is a doting suburban wife and mother, there’s something in the way she wields a taser, a hairspray-can flamethrower and a nail-studded baseball bat that suggests this isn’t her first rodeo.
She’s played by Juno Temple in an exuberant, nicely accented performance that suggests the English actress will have more awards to go with the ones she’s had for her scene-stealing turn in Ted Lasso. Past Fargo seasons have always had a knack for great casting and actor chemistry – season two stars Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons and season three’s Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead ended up married in real life. The new season’s other heavy hitters include Jon Hamm as Sheriff Roy Tillman and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lorraine Lyon.
The Tillman character is a swaggering North Dakota lawman who is a god-fearing law unto himself and whose interest in Dorothy’s kidnapping may not be wholly professional. He’s certainly a change from the dutiful cops who protected and served against some very bad people in the movie and the early seasons.
Lorraine Lyon is Dorothy’s billionaire mother-in-law who has long suspected there is something amiss about the woman who married her mild-mannered son.
Between Sheriff Tillman, and ruthless Lorraine – “What’s the point of being a billionaire if you can’t have someone killed?” she poses – it seems Hawley wants this season to say something pointed about America.
Past seasons kept the outside world largely at bay. This one, though, is set in 2019, the third year of the Trump presidency. We first meet Dorothy at a meeting at her daughter’s school, which has descended into culture-war chaos. Later, when Lorraine’s corporate lawyer is talking to police investigating Dorothy’s kidnapping, he tells them: “With all due respect, we’ve got our own reality.”
It seems the fifth Fargo is set in the era of alternative facts, which, for a show that has always started with the opening rider “this is a true story”, is oddly amusing.
But after the wearying sprawl of the mob-saga season four, the early episodes of five suggest Hawley and the characters he’s created for Temple, Hamm and Jason Leigh may be just the ticket to Make Fargo Great Again.
Streaming: Neon, from Wednesday, November 22 and on SoHo, from Monday, November 27
