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

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).

How many people only know of Jon Hamm in relation to Gawker posts about his large penis. Got to be at least a few dozen right? No Mad Men, no The Town, just photographed free balling.

I've been meaning to add that Mad Men isn't exactly ancient history--it went off the air all of eight years ago. Anyway, I'll leave it at that. Some people will take all that into Fargo, some won't.

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

Are you getting this from interviews? I only encounter his off-screen persona on his friends' podcasts, where he's as charming and goofy as he was during Mad Men, and as they describe him being (minus the confidence of success) before he got the job.

xp off the air, yes, but a decade since he was on set (and the character was being internally dismantled in those last episodes), with 81 on-camera as-character jobs in TV alone between that and Fargo, plus voice work and a substantial film career.

Not trying to pick on clem, just that the Fargo perf seems completely in line with the rest of Hamm's career as this viewer has intersected with it.

This is a real sticking point for you, isn't it. We disagree. Enough said.

I was a big fan of Mad Men when it aired, but I had to look up who Lee Garner, Jr., was.

So I'm the only one who's never seen a second of Mad Men, then? I've seen Hamm in loads of other things and NOT that! So this whole discourse is bemusing.

I've never seen a second of Ted Lasso. (Not really by choice--not available thus far on what I pay for.) Everyone brings something different. My original point had more to do with Hamm himself. Since none of us are inside his head, speculation.

One thing I started to warm to in the second episode was the way they apply a Burroughs cut-up to the movie--spill it all out on the floor and reassemble it sideways.

I’m about to go in on episode 2. Anticipating more breakfast.

Chekhov's pancakes

Richa Moorjani, one of the two cops, is also the older cousin in Never Have I Ever. Watching that scene early on in ep1 of Fargo, where she and Juno Temple are talking to each other in their Minnesotan accents is a double-whiplash.

She's good. Looked at her film/TV credits, and this is the first time I've ever seen her.

As far as I’m concerned Fletch is now Jon Hamm’s signature role