Fargo (TV series)

[syntheticgerbil]

15 hours ago, Gormongous said:

Now that the third season of Fargo is done airing, I've been making my way through it and I've been enjoying myself a lot. What the TV iterations of Fargo have argued, with increasing success, is that we live in a universe that appears chaotic to us, with our limited perspective, because of all the moving parts interacting in hundreds of thousands of different ways. Each character creates their own partial narrative, to try to make sense of the seeming noise, but the truth (if you can call it the truth) is always bigger.

 

Season 3 is no season 2, which managed to be a dizzying mess of which no one was in control, but it's still very entertaining as a wheels-within-wheels crime drama. Carrie Coon continues to be a revelation, after being the best part of The Leftovers by far, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pulling her weight, too. Ewan McGregor has the toughest row to hoe, playing two identical brothers, and he seems to be in over his head a little? Each of the characters is fine on his own as the "dupe" laid out by William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard in the original movie, but together they lack texture. David Thewlis is much better, probably his best stab at milquetoast sinister yet, but he's also responsible for what is probably the least good part of this season? Fargo characters usually get a chance, once or twice in the show, to explain their understanding of the every-growing and changing catastrophe that is the season's plot, usually as a proxy for explaining their worldview, but this latest season has a lot more of this than either of the two previous ones. I've watched five episodes, half the show, and Thewlis has had at least three protracted soliloquies about the power of money in a cold, chaotic, and uncaring universe. It's wearing out his character with too much talk. Hope it improves! Although it's already really good, so who can say.

I'm in complete agreement here. I really didn't like most of what was going on in Season 2 in terms of characters and this amount of gang nonsense. I guess to me a bunch of mixups and some humble characters along with a few pleasant but incredibly sinsiter ones is what Fargo is to me if I were to take an essence. David Thewlis did wear thin for me, but he grossed me out if he was on screen too long. Those lips argh. Otherwise I loved it, great improvement on what I thought was going to be another iffy followup. Also I generally love Ewan McGregor in anything so that helps.

 

Also after being kind of annoyed and confused at this show for just being a bunch of strange and vague reference humor(?), now that they have just started adding long animated sequences I have embraced this thing as sort of a fun shitshow of discombobulated writing.

[Chris]

I recently watched through Season 2 of Fargo and I really really liked it. I think at times its ambitions and affectations outstripped its substance, but in general I think its shortcomings are justified by how stylistically appealing and solidly made the whole thing is. It feels lighter on its feet than a lot of "prestige" television that would accompany this sort of material with too much assumed gravitas and grit. It's basically the scale and scope that are entirely appealing to me in film when it comes to crime and thrillers: mid-budget made-for-adults taut stories that don't get too bogged down in utterly egregious violence.

[Gormongous]

Sometimes the pervasive references to the Coens' visual and literary touches in the Fargo TV show wear thin, but I also just really like how clearly obsessed with Clive in A Serious Man saying that something is "mere surmise" the writers of the third season have been. The exact phrase, or the similar "mere surmising," has appeared at least four times, and characters in general seem much more likely to say "surmise" than "guess" or "think." It's that odd intersection between cod-pretentious and actually quite vivid and clever that makes Fargo enjoyable to me as a show.

[Chris]

5 hours ago, Gormongous said:

It's that odd intersection between cod-pretentious and actually quite vivid and clever that makes Fargo enjoyable to me as a show.

 

This is I think how I feel about Legion as well, which makes me think it's largely the sensibility of Noah Hawley. Sometimes it definitely goes too far, but when it hits, it's really fresh and fun. I am very much looking forward to more work from Hawley.

[syntheticgerbil]

I wish someone would just make a thorough listing of all of the references to Coen brothers movies throughout this show. Like some kind of Coen Bros. megafan who can list names, shared music, similar shots, similar settings, pieces of dialogue, scene recreations, and shared actors. It's probably a very difficult task at this point but I wish I could go through it without scrolling through a bunch of lumped messages on Reddit.

[Ben X]

22 hours ago, syntheticgerbil said:

I wish someone would just make a thorough listing of all of the references to Coen brothers movies throughout this show. Like some kind of Coen Bros. megafan who can list names, shared music, similar shots, similar settings, pieces of dialogue, scene recreations, and shared actors. It's probably a very difficult task at this point but I wish I could go through it without scrolling through a bunch of lumped messages on Reddit.

 

You should do it!

[BigJKO]

Here's a long list of "easter eggs" http://www.ranker.com/list/fargo-easter-eggs/lisa-waugh and some more http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/fargo-a-guide-to-the-shows-coen-brothers-references-w477546

[Gormongous]

I finished the third season. Overall, I liked it, especially the female performances, although I think that it's weaker as a complete work than, say, the second or even the first season.

 

 

The good things: Carrie Coon was strong throughout, especially in the episodes where they devoted more time to her. Mary Elizabeth Winstead really came into her own in the back half of the season, after Ray passed, and her relationship with Mr. Wrench actually made me happy that they brought back the latter character even though I had no attachment to his original appearances. Olivia Sandoval was amazing as Winnie Lopez and I kept checking her IMDB page in disbelief that this is her first bigger role. Actually, in general, I liked that there were more Latinx roles, both big and small, and that the Minnesota within which the episodes took place seemed to be part of the Upper Midwest that I've known in real life, rather than the more cartoonish version of previous seasons. Maybe that's a weakness for other people, but it's a strength for me.

The bad things (or, really, just not-as-good, because I liked this show overall): I was correct in my guess, I'd gotten tired of David Thewlis' character by the end. His performance was solid, but the constant discursions any time anyone questioned him were too much. Much like stereotypes of the Midwest, Fargo characters tend to be better when they speak less. That said, I did enjoy his character's twisted relationship with food and teeth, and the fact that (as far as I could tell) all of his stories about history and culture were apocryphal, like the one about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. I'm also sad to say that Ewan McGregor's performance didn't really work for me. I get what he was doing and I appreciated the technical difficulties of it, but when the first part of the season hangs on the rivalry and differences between the two, I felt like Ray and Emmit lacked enough texture to really pull me into them. Finally, I just don't think that a massive international conspiracy to commit tax fraud was a particularly good crisis around which to stage a season of Fargo? The show's always been about local problems coming home to roost and how the wide-open Midwest is actually a bottle that makes the attendant consequences inescapable. Emmit inviting trouble with a million-dollar loan from an international gangster fits into that mold, but the gradual expansion of the season's scope to include the IRS, offshore accounts, aggressive buyouts, and Homeland Security began to water down the show's signature claustrophobia. The final scene, waiting for one outcome or the other in an interrogation room, was excellent, but I'm not sure it was entirely worth it, in the end.

I did like how V.M. Varga/Daniel Rand did get one last "surmise" in, though.

[syntheticgerbil]

On 7/11/2017 at 4:50 AM, Ben X said:

 

You should do it!

Hah, I'm not enough of a fan to do a comprehensive list. Half of what I know of in the Fargo TV series was from people listing stuff on IMDB but those forums are nuked now.

Maybe Noah Hawley should just release a list.

 

On 7/11/2017 at 5:44 AM, BigJKO said:

Here's a long list of "easter eggs" http://www.ranker.com/list/fargo-easter-eggs/lisa-waugh and some more http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/fargo-a-guide-to-the-shows-coen-brothers-references-w477546

Woo thanks those had some good ones I missed also including season 3 now!