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

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.

If anything, I'd say they were maybe a little too hung up on visuals this time--especially the darkened, Godfather/Gordon Willis look to everything (except episode 9, where they go for John Ford)--and slacked off on the story, which for me was much more compelling in S2.

We finally finished this. We thought we missed an episode but I was confused, because there were 11 rather than the usual 10. Man, what an impeccable waste of time and space this thing was, almost totally vapid and vaporous.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

it'll be voting for it for sure. i didn't enjoy it as much as 2&3, but it still had some great moments.

Wish I'd read this thread before slogging through s4. It was really bad. Might have enjoyed it if they cut out 75% of the Big Speeches and Quirky Mannerisms and shortened the whole thing by half.

Season 5 incoming

The coffee’s to die for. Installment 5 of FX’s Fargo premieres 11.21 on FX. Stream on Hulu. #FargoFX pic.twitter.com/mHdIKGmg61

— Fargo (@FargoFX) September 25, 2023

Very much looking forward to both this and True Detective. S4 was a bit of a letdown for me, but there are a few things that linger in my mind, especially the way they tied everything back (or rather forward) to the masterful S2.

Well, I'll take Fat Hamm over Chris Rock at least.

pretty slim for a Hamm if you ask me

Dave Foley!

https://ew.com/tv/fargo-casting-season-5-warren-littlefield-rachel-tenner/

Gets going next week. Counting the days!

last season kind of sucked, so I'm hoping it bounces back, the earlier seasons were all great.

Psyched

I hope they work in a Mad Men allusion somewhere, maybe a John Slattery cameo. (Not really.)

Pretty hyped for this even though the last season was maybe the worst show I've seen through to the end.

I was extremely mixed on S4; blanked out on S3, but now I remember, the Carrie Coon season.

I finally watched S4 over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for the new one, and struggled to stay interested. But cautiously optimistic about S5.

Watched E1 tonight. Two imaginative bits of music, but I found the sideways overlap with the movie puzzling, to say the least.

this was pretty good by the garbage standards of the last few series. Jennifer Jason Leigh is still so hot.

Few or two? S2 is a masterpiece, I'd say.

oh yeah, I might have added one terrible season of fargo too many there.

The one thing I got out of S3 was Carrie Coon, who's always great. Don't remember much else at this point.

If this season doesn't come through, though, I'll just think of it as a mediocre show with one memorable exception, S2, right out of the blue.

a mediocrity like Ewan McGregor x2 is a red line for me, that was the point I ditched this show.

I was not prepared for ep1 to be a lengthy tribute to Home Alone.

Season 3 was still great imo, David Thewlis was so memorable. I would take Ewan over Chris Rock any day (who I always want to like, but he just always takes me out of it).

S1 great
S2 excellent
S3 pretty good
S4 pretty good, didn't hate it nearly to the degree that others in this thread seem to

Looking forward to the new season but haven't started yet.

Yeah I enjoyed the last 2 seasons, especially season 3. But they were undoubtedly a step down from the first 2 seasons.

I like how everyone in the US is like “Ewan’s fine, even good sometimes” and the general UK opinion is “this guy sucks and can’t act”

Problems with S4:
Jason Schwartzmann
Jason Schwartzmann’s brother
The serial killer nurse who played the role of Mary Elizabeth Winstead/Kirsten Dunst was just offputting and uninteresting
Not enough space for the Black teenage girl, who was interesting
Also Chris Rock’s son and the Irish guy adopted by the Italians. And the rest of the Black crime family.

Basically they made it about the wrong characters.

Rofl at the poor kid with the airhorn

Ha yes that bit made me laugh very heartily.
Out of the gate I'm already liking this new season way more than S3 or 4. The Original Fargo refs are being laid on a bit thick* and it's very odd seeing Juno Temple doing a Minnesotan accent.

*Trucote mention did make me lol.

Is the hitman supposed to be some unholy amalgam of Chigurh and Hanzee Dent? He talks like Hanzee and for a moment I thought it was him, like remember he had that insane plastic surgery and ended up being a fat white guy somehow.

Found the references to the movie delightful, especially now that Hawley’s done 15x as many hours as the movie before this season — it’s really fun to act as though this were a very very loose adaptation of something, after not following any of the source material for the last nine years. Also optimistic about this being more focused / fun / compelling than the last round or two.