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

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.

Great first episode. Love that we have no idea what is actually going on. Juno Temple character knows how to field dress a wound but not that she shouldn’t beat the pancake mix too much :) or she’s kinda insane.

she’s traumatised!

Fr. Loving this season so far, especially the continuing Home Alone energy and Hamm's nipple rings. Also like the alternate on the movie premise.

Second episode was better than the first; won't say too much until I've seen a couple more.

Jon Hamm is clearly having a great time. After seven seasons of navigating Don Draper's personal demons, I'm sure it's a relief to play a character who evidently doesn't have any.

Hard to believe: first time I've ever heard Grand Funk's "Paranoid."

"We run a pretty tight ship here," put that beside the Tru-Coat line.

Hamm has played a lot of characters in the decade since Mad Men finished shooting tbf!

Obviously I know that, and just as obviously he's still defined by Don Draper.

So many of Hamm’s post-MM roles have had a broad comedic streak. This one was does too but I like that there is a darker streak here

Couldn't figure out where I knew Juno Temple from till I checked afterwards: The Offer, the making-the-Godfather thing (she was great in it).

She was also in Ted Lasso of course but I assume everyone knew.

(what I didn't know until a little while ago is that she's Julian Temple's kid!)

Obviously I know that, and just as obviously he's still defined by Don Draper.

You were talking about his own experience - given the amount of broad comedy he did during Mad Men, and the range and quantity of material he's played since, I doubt he has to think about Dick Whitman's whole life every time the camera rolls.

It's possible he chose to and relished playing his own naked bumcrack in this, as a contrast to his experience in Good Omens S2, tho.

If I'd been talking about Woody Harrelson or John Travolta, actors who long since moved past the TV roles that first brought them to prominence, I think you'd have a good point. But Jon Hamm--like James Gandolfini, Mary Tyler Moore, and many others before him--hasn't been able to do that, not yet anyway, so Don Draper is always there. Not just in how I view him, but also, I believe, in how he chooses roles and how he carries them out. Found this piece that makes more or less the same point:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2023/11/22/jon-hamm-fargo-good-omens-maverick/

Making no secret of his desire to get away from Don, Hamm has worked pretty hard to play against type — as the kidnapper/cult leader Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” as himself on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a villain in “Baby Driver,” the by-the-book Air Boss trying to keep Maverick in check in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the jerk in “Bridesmaids,” Fletch in “Confess, Fletch” and a gorgeous idiot on “30 Rock” whose obliviousness to how the world works is obviated by the fact that it (the world) caters to his every whim.

He hasn’t been hiding, in other words. He’s on record as loving comedy, he’s good at it, and he’s been clowning around for years, all but circling and underlining the ways his unsmiling gravitas as TV’s deepest, most depressive ad man was a stylized, highly artificial choice. A performance so self-serious it’s maybe even a little bit silly. He treats the version of American manhood he wielded like a superpower as if it’s a trick — rendering our veneration of it a little absurd every time he deploys that dopey smile. “Really?” he seems to be saying when he’s hamming it up the most. “You fell for this guy?”

Those mild subversions haven’t worked. They usually scan as genial self-deprecation about his own good looks, which only increases the modern-day Marlboro Man’s appeal. Eight years later after “Mad Men” ended, it’s still almost impossible not to see Hamm as Draper.

I think that's true, and I think it's just as true for Hamm: "Making no secret of his desire to get away from Don."

Even the idea of Tillman as the Marlboro Man has some extra resonance, I'd say, because of Don Draper's relationship with Lucky Strike and Lee Garner Jr.

There's an entire subset of the population I've recently encountered who know who Jon Hamm is but never watched Mad Men. I think a generation of tv reviewers and writers will never forget

That makes sense. But I think Hamm himself is part of the group stuck with Don Draper.

Having gotten used to slapstick Hamm, I'm glad that this character has a little more gravitas than he's been bringing in the last decade (even if it's very funny in context, he's playing it straight).