I always want to like Fargo more than I do. The FX anthology series from Noah Hawley debuts its fourth season this Sunday with another Midwestern fable about life, death, and bitter cold. It stars Chris Rock as a the leader of an organized crime racket in 1952 in Kansas City, Missouri, squaring off against the local mafiosos, led by Jason Schwartzman. The Italians, the Fadda family, were there before Rock’s ring, the Cannons—but they were preceded by an Irish crime outfit, who were themselves preceded by a Jewish one. The first episode gives us a brief history of these families in Kansas City, who all attempted—and failed—to maintain peace by trading their youngest sons to be raised by the rival family.
You’d think that after three failed truces, this son-trading thing would be widely regarded as a bad move. But as narrated to the audience by the lethally clear-eyed teenager Ethelrida Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield), the only black student at the local high school, humans seem determined to barrel towards strife and violence no matter what history has taught us. So despite the obvious trauma that Josto Fadda (Schwartzman) experienced as a young boy traded to the Irish—or that his man Rabbi Mulligan (Ben Whishaw) did as an Irish boy traded to the Jews and then absorbed, during strife, by the Italians—Loy Cannon (Rock) trades his own son Satchel (Rodney L Jones III) for a young member of the Fadda family, Zero (Jameson Braccioforte). Fargo begins its fourth season poised on a knife, waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop.
And waits. And waits. The show begins each episode with the hyperbolic, haunting, utterly untrue text from the beginning of the film, diluting its power with every use: “THIS IS A TRUE STORY,” it begins, before adding with foreboding, “At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.” This is a lot of pomp and circumstance for a show that ends up moving very slowly and quite tortuously, plodding through episodes and roping in fantastically named new characters as if detail is a replacement for having a point. The detail can be wonderful: The production brings the interiors of the slightly shabby Midwest to neutral-toned life, tainting its respectability with the incursion of strife at every turn. There’s a character named Doctor Harvard and another named Doctor Senator, and Andrew Bird is there as Ethelrida’s father, Thurman Smutny. (Her mom, Dibrell, played by Anji White, is black.)
You can see why actors like being on Fargo. The show is dominated by its rich texture, and the characters are imaginative creations—their mouths full of pretentious monologues about life and death, their hands driven by inexplicable desires and the heavy weight of duty. They have the freedom to take up so much space, and time, with the quirks of their performance. And because Hawley’s show pipes in at least some version of the movie’s sardonic wit, there’s something almost parodic about the whole undertaking, a self-seriousness that is also an inside joke. This might best be expressed this season in Jessie Buckley’s wild take on a twisted nurse named Oraetta Mayflower. She wears a white nurse uniform complete with white hat and white tights, and speaks with a Minnesota (??) accent that borders on the satirical. Or maybe it’s in Schwartzman’s freewheeling take on a mafia don—a scenery-chewing performance imbued with a metatextual sarcasm, a Coppola scion aping the tropes his family so firmly established.