Actually fits Fargo not at this time. Such an anthology series – where each season tells a new story, with new actors – is at odds with the tendency to repeat past successes. Series of Sex and the City until Six Feet Under get reboots, titles like Grey’s Anatomy (the twentieth season is coming) go on endlessly. And what about the flow of productions from the Star Wars and Marvel universes. Trusted, safe, viewers guaranteed.
Fargo (2014 – current) seems at first glance to fit into that trend. After all, the series is inspired by the 1996 film of the same name. The setting has also been the same for five seasons: the wide, cold Midwest of America, especially the states of Minnesota and North Dakota. But that is also the only constant factor. In addition to the story and the cast, the time in which the series is set is also different every season.
Moreover, it is Fargo anything but comfort TV. If only because you never know exactly what you are looking at. Something between comedy and drama, sometimes alienating, then realistic. With a mix of eccentric and recognizable characters, whose paths cross amid explosions of violence or inexplicable events that turn life in their calm hometowns upside down. Always with that statement at the beginning: This is a true story. A deliberate lie: Fargo is not a true crime – talking about formulaic television.
Housewife
The fifth season is set in 2019, the most recent period the makers chose so far. The young housewife Dorothy Lyon (Juno Temple) from the town of Scandia, Minnesota is wanted by her ex-husband Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). Roy, a sheriff in neighboring North Dakota, does not accept that Dorothy left him ten years earlier. Just like in masterpiece Mad Men Hamm portrays an archetypal macho man, this time with a conservative Christian slant.
Dorothy hides her past with Roy from her current husband Wayne (David Rysdahl) and his mother Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the tough CEO of a debt collection company. This becomes increasingly difficult when Roy sends criminal Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) to capture Dorothy and bring her ‘home’. With his flowerpot haircut, Ole resembles previous unsightly villains from the Fargo universe and provides some of the funniest moments. An equally gruesome and absurdly funny scene with a gas horn in the first episode stands out.
Spectrum of masculinity
But where the previous season of Fargo lost itself in such farcicality, the fifth season makes room for more realism and depth. And for social criticism, without being too obvious. The makers mainly investigate the relationships between men and women.
Part of this involves examining masculinity. At one end of that spectrum is Dorothy’s mild-mannered husband Wayne, who prefers the reality series Real Housewives (talking about canned television: 27 spin-offs!). On the other side sits Roy, in his cowboy hat the epitome of traditional masculinity. Roy sees Dorothy as his property and believes that a man is sometimes allowed to hit his wife. It slowly becomes clear why Dorothy fled from him.
The most hopeless Fargo man is Roy’s son and deputy Gator (Joe Keery). Twenty-something Gator, with his sunglasses on his head backwards, wants to be as masculine as his dad, but keeps missing the point. Eats spicy snacks even though he really can’t handle them. Doesn’t suck on a cigarette in a quasi-cool way, but on a brightly colored vape. That vape symbolizes the kind of masculinity that Gator embodies compared to that of the generations of men before him: it is at least as toxic, but at least the Marlboro man still radiated something.
The women in Fargo are constantly underestimated by men. Even the icy CEO Lorraine is patronized by a male business partner. She’s making him pay hard. Above all, Lorraine does not want to play the victim. Women who do that are destroying America, she says to agent Indira (Richa Moorjani), who cares about Dorothy’s fate. But Dorothy, Indira protests, never called herself a victim. “Sometimes crimes are simply committed against people. They are made victims. And that’s not their fault.” But the feminist Indira also struggles: she does not dare to stand up to her own insufferable husband, who wants her to take care of him like a mother.
Above all the good that Fargo season 5 offers, Juno Temple’s acting performance still exceeds. On the one hand, her Dorothy is fragile, afraid of Roy. At the same time, she is unyielding down to her toes, a resourceful survivor. “You didn’t tell me she was a tiger,” says Ole when he reports to Roy, empty-handed. Thanks to her ability to tap into different things, Dorothy keeps eluding the man who wants to squeeze her into a straitjacket.
Too bad we lost Dorothy/Temple after this season – but that’s just the way it is Fargo.