“You have everything”, an awestruck Peggy tells Don, cautioning that times of plenty are quick to pass in the process. The second year’s very different, but we’ve got a phenomenal cast. When one of the offspring of a local crime family lands himself in a heap of trouble of the triple homicide variety, Solverson and his father-in-law/boss (Ted Danson) begin piecing together a tangled web of clues leading everywhere from that crime syndicate’s beleaguered widow-in-waiting (Jean Smart) to a plucky hairdresser (Kirsten Dunst) and her squeaky-clean butcher husband (Jesse Plemons). But the only way to exercise the ghost is to just make something great. If there’s a better show this season-or possibly this year-I’ll be happily surprised. The first season pulled off what seemed like an impossible task: living up to the wit, surprise and suspense of the 1996 movie that inspired it. The second season seems likely to live up to the first. “My feeling is you can’t just repeat yourself”.
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All of this takes place against the backdrop of the late 1970s: gas lines, Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech, the long, heavy shadows of Watergate and (especially) Vietnam.
The main thrust of the season is seen through the eyes of a younger Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson), who has an ill wife Betsy (Cristin Milioti, never escaping the dying-mom syndrome) and a 4-year-old Molly (who grows up to be season one’s revelation, Allison Tolman).
Lou doesn’t mention Sioux Falls, but in hindsight he’s clearly talking about it when, near the end of the episode, he and Molly talk over her frustrations with her current case and her boss, Bemidji Police Chief Bill Oswalt (Bob Odenkirk). You meet the criminals before the crime is committed, right?
We’re centered again in the Midwest?
The various plotlines are all driven by the decision of the Kansas City mob to take over North Dakota, a territory controlled by the German-American Gerhardt family, which is based in Fargo.
The filming also required scores of vintage cars, many of which producers were able to track down locally. The most exciting casting is a mustache-less Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) as a conspiracy-theorist lawyer, showing us that a few small town crazies can be pretty smart. It’s a bigger story with more moving pieces. My only reservation, (apart from the quibble regarding Dunst) it’s that I’ve only seen four episodes and, as season one demonstrated, a powerful start does not guarantee sustained momentum. It’s sort of just decency versus evil, which I like. “I’d tell you the details, but it’d sound like I made ’em up”. I think Joel Coen once said, “Polite societies are often the most violent”. “They didn’t know they were waiting for Reagan, but it turned out that they were”. He was so locked up and unable to really even finish a sentence that people died. “So that enabled me to make my own character”.
“Peggy is a amusing lady, I liken her to a Scooby Doo character sometimes”.
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Often the complications in Fargo are what you would encounter in a lot of basic multi-camera sitcoms. There’s an inevitability to that, things going wrong, the slow-motion train wreck, that we have to cut against with a certain amount of unpredictability, I think. We already know Season 2 is a prequel to last years original series.
