We need a thread for the FARGO TV show yah? Oh, yah!

yeah. currently just a psycho.

it's set in 1950

Into the timeline of the Atomic Age, but not quite into the Space Age.

the nurse is already central to the narrative, she literally connects the gangster plot to the funeral home plot

yeah, but that's purely functional. I assume given the amount of time we have spent with her she will amount to more than a mere bridge.

Yeah--whatever deeper connection there is. She made me think of this famous case in Ontario, Susan Nelles (case dismissed).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_hospital_baby_deaths

Three episodes in and I'm enjoying it, but fr what is up with all the fart jokes

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ff/d6/e7/ffd6e7d7f23d2f6ed32a86c7097e130e.jpg

fart-go

i'm enjoying it, but it feels like every character and plot in the show is more interesting than the chris rock/jason schwartzman gang showdown plotline, so i hope they add some more weirdness to the story through the season. chris rock is fine but so far they're clearly protecting him by not giving him much heavy acting to do. schwartzman doesn't seem to fit into his part. i really like the sociopathic nurse, everything going on at the funeral home, and whoever plays doctor senator. i'm also really enjoying the italian brother, who is completely chewing the scenery but at least brings some energy to the show.

lol my wife asked me during the last episode if the Italian brother was supposed to be so hammy.

I remember the actor who plays Doctor Senator from his role as a high school science teacher in Gremlins!

The Italian brother and his googly eyes! At first I thought it would be better if they ditched the stunt casting and just had great character actors, but it clearly seems to be going for a mix of gravity and wackiness/schlock (in a different way than previous seasons).

Chris Rock is doing a pretty decent job of not being Chris Rock, Schwartzman can only Schwartzman but I'm not really mad at it.

But the ipecac pie hanging around ominously, and just for another fart joke? :(

oh i like the ben whishaw character too and it seems like he's going to be at the center of whatever happens in the mob plotline

He seems like the only character who is not a cartoony agent of chaos.

I'm starting to lose interest a bit. It's not bad, but there just isn't the tension or urgency of S2.

andrew bird whistling alert

We are having the hardest time figuring this one out. It's not bad, per se, but there are so many distractions. Too many actors who can't really act (Andrew Bird, Chris Rock), too many actors overacting (googly eyes, Schwartzman, the nurse, the outlaws), all in service of ... not much, so far. The other seasons had some hint of profundity or philosophy to them. Grand theories of fate, or truth, or classical tragedy, things bigger than us. This one ... it's just kind of an aimless, watered-down "Miller's Crossing" right now, with the most interesting stuff (like the child-swapping) hovering out of frame, while the boilerplate gangster stuff hogs the focus. And just a bunch of distractions (like the nurse or the OCD cop) still only sneaking around the periphery. It's just so ... off. I mean, I suppose Chris Rock is the star? Yet at the same time he barely feels essential to the story. Meanwhile, you've got Timothy Olyphant, who is great in everything and typically a TV lead, and yet here, even once again in his wheelhouse as a cop (a federal marshal, no less!), it's almost like he's doing someone a favor by being in this at all.

After a scene between Doctor Senator and the consiglieri, or Olyphant and the crooked detective, we've been turning to each other and saying "see? actors!"

It would have been great if Andrew Bird's character was mute and could only communicate via whistling.

Now *that's* a character quirk I could get behind.

i generally agree with josh's analysis. i'll keep watching bc it's the one show i'm watching without my wife right now and i have enjoyed past seasons, but yeah this one has not taken off yet. there have been some good moments - i liked the ghost (?) that came out of the bathtub, e.g.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Chris Rock's credit card vision has been mentioned maybe ... twice? And if that, once only in passing?

I've decided I enjoy the non-complementary manneredness of some of the actors, and am fine with this being far less plotty than previous seasons so far, but ghod the digital colour grading is horrible.

It's still more fun to watch than most tv shows, so I'll still looking forward to it even if it's sillier and less immersive than the other seasons.

xpost Is that why the whole thing looks like a bunch of virtual sets? (Even though I know they shot a bunch of this literally down the street from me.)

Yeah, they've found all these buildings that stand era-appropriate, and carefully dressed the main domestic locations to reflect the inhabitants' personalities, then instead of lighting & photographing them to show them off, every frame is basically painted over to look like a video game.

There is just a lot going on in this season. The stuttering crooked detective is tasked by Chris Rock to bring his boy home or be killed, but he would clearly be killed by the Italians if he did that, so he's stuck in the middle. But then we're introduced to a new character who takes the boy out of the equation (and is then taken out of the equation himself), so it doesn't matter anyway? Idk, maybe it's supposed to feel chaotic, everyone's ordering around their subordinates who are either incompetent or disloyal.

but ghod the digital colour grading is horrible.

― Un-fooled and placid (sic), Thursday, October 22, 2020 1:30 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

it looks like utter shit.

I also don't like it in every other way - the other main bugbear: every scene is someone making a speech at someone - but that is what jumps out the most.

Man, this season is such a disappointing mess. I've rarely seen anything quite so overcooked and undercooked at the same time. Eight episodes in and I barely know anyone's name, not that it matters, since I don't care about 90% of their fates, either. It's just all so pointless, with practically nothing to say about race, immigration, family, all the themes I thought it was introducing but which turned out to be dead ends. And so much pointless speech giving that just stops the story, as such, in its tracks, and secondary characters that hog the spotlight to no real purpose.

sorta felt that way from the git go; glad i quit after one.

feel like if you give something the format, budget, casting of prestige tv people will believe in it. despite how shit it is

Cute dog though

feel like if you give something the format, budget, casting of prestige tv people will believe in it. despite how shit it is

It's still the same guy writing (on) every episode and directing the first two, so even if this season sucks, it's because sometimes good creators turn out duds, not because some new ruse was perpetuated upon the dullard public from scratch

oh I think this show was mediocre from the jump, although it has gotten worse imo

Hard disagree there.

You could see what he was going for with the Wizard of Oz thing in the most recent episode, but yeah, this season just has jagged edges everywhere (where 1 - 3 did not imo).

Yeah, first two seasons are good and extremely entertaining crime telly, third one also entertaining if less consistent. This one not only doesn't seem to have an underlying point, it hasn't built compelling enough characters to really care how it turns out for whichever of them survive, nor to set up their respective wants in a way that creates conflict we can invest in, and the narrative structure of each episode is basically "shove fifty minutes of events into a bag, create an ending by having someone either get shot or nearly get shot."

third was where i felt the sadism stopped being anything plot or story motivated and simply a way of upping the stakes
first two were pretty impressive but i think i've got the gist of what the creator is doing now and I'm not sure he can turn this battleship on his own anymore

I lost interest so fast, I abandoned this in the middle of the fifth episode for a month. Restarted that one, and surprisingly thought it was the best episode yet. But I'm braced for the worst. The undertaker's daughter is very good.

I've persevered with this but have no idea where it's going, nor do I care. Bits have been very entertaining stand alone, but now people have started coming back from the dead idgaf.

(...Lil Kid Rock wasn't actually killed, Moustache Schwartzmann just told Grey Chris Rock that Big Face Hood killed him so that Rock would take revenge by going after Bruddah Fadda. Bruddah himself just has too thick a skull to die from a measly gunshot, I think.)

Bruddah was the one I was thinking of. The girls shot him through the head.

I thought they clearly shot him on the side of his head and in the very same scene said something like "it's ok, he's not dead"

Did they? Oh well, shows how engaged I was.

If anyone's still watching there's a post credits scene in this week's finale which is a neat little callback to Season 2, if you can remember that far back

Finally finished. I'll mention a couple of things you shouldn't read if you haven't and plan to.

I picked up on Satchel growing up to be Mike Milligan two or three episodes before the last. It took me a long time sometimes to match names to characters--the first eight episodes were so darkly lit--but when it sunk in that Satchel's guardian was Milligan, it occurred to me that Satchel would take his name after Milligan was killed. That was my favourite character in S2, so I liked that connection a lot.

The rest--after almost giving up early on--was pretty good. My ranking would be S2 way out in front, S1/S4 next, S3 a bit behind them (Carrie Coon excepted). I posted early on about Jason Schwartzman seeming totally wrong, but in the end, his schtick was a welcome respite from the doom and gloom. Couldn't stand the neurotic cop. Very ambitious visually. The period music sometimes worked well, though nothing as thrilling as Three Dog Night and Jethro Tull in S2. The nurse getting shoehorned into the story was kind of confounding--not uninteresting, but I don't know whatever prompted them to come up with that character. (I know she provided some plot connections, but nothing that couldn't have been established some other way.) Schwartzman's one speech about Johnny Society, which I quoted in the Trump Films thread, was brilliant.

We thought we had two more episodes to go, but it's only after the Wizard of Oz one (9?) that we realized we must have missed one (8). Not that it matters much. (Guy in the trunk at the start? Shrug.) I wonder if we'll go back and watch it before dragging ourselves to the finish line. We watch TV in the basement, and the TV is often drowned out when the nearby HVAC kicks in, so we sometimes put on the captions. In this case we learned that "Rabbi" is actually "Milligan," not that it matters what anyone's name is in this apparently literally pointless season.

I read somebody dismissing the Trump speech I like so much as too obvious. The connection's hard to miss, yes, but I wouldn't say the context is obvious at all, using this long-ago story for a contemporary resonance.

There are actually two eps after the Wizard of Oz one (11 total)

Should probably watch episode 8 too - it wasn't one of the better ones but did contain some important character development

Very ambitious visually. 

there was one shot c. ep 7 where the camera went from outdoors to inside the funeral home, and they had to keep natural lighting instead of painting everything a murky digital green. otherwise, citation needed.

My short-term memory is terrible--I'd literally have to go back and start making notes. But I was often thinking, "That looks great." One obvious example would be Milligan getting swept up by the tornado. Or some of the framing of the nurse.