10+ / 10
Fargo is among the best television series of the past fifteen years and a hugely ambitious anthology production in American television history.
Noah Hawley created the series for FX. The first season aired in 2014. Five seasons have aired across the past decade with additional seasons in development. Each season is standalone narrative set in a different period with different characters, while maintaining the tonal continuity, regional setting, and visual approach that the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film established.
The 10+/10 is for a consistently strong prestige television achievement of the past decade.
My answer to anyone who claims television can’t stand next to the movies is Fargo.
Hawley took a Coen Brothers film I’d have called untouchable and built five seasons on it that feel like they belong in the same frozen world, with the same politeness, the same dumb luck and the same sudden blood. I think that’s close to impossible, and he made it look easy. The 10+ is pure affection, and my one grumble is Kansas City.
Hawley had been working as a novelist and television writer before the Fargo project. He’d produced limited acclaim for his earlier work. The Fargo series transformed his career and made him a hugely influential showrunner in contemporary American television. He’d later create Legion and develop additional FX productions. The Fargo work remains his foundational achievement and the production where his showrunning approach reached full maturity.
The Anthology Approach
The anthology structure is one of the series’ most distinctive choices. Each season tells a complete story with different characters in a different time period. The seasons don’t require viewing in order. Season one is set in 2006. Season two is set in 1979. Season three is set in 2010. Season four is set in the 1950s in Kansas City. Season five is set in 2019. Audiences can enter the series at any season and receive a complete narrative experience.
Because it’s an anthology, the production can also engage different genre material across different seasons.
The first season is small-town crime drama. The second season is broader regional crime epic. The third season is identity-confusion psychological thriller. The fourth season is period crime drama with serious political content. The fifth season is contemporary crime thriller with supernatural undertones. The result is a series that handles multiple sub-genres while maintaining the Fargo brand identity.
Specific casting opportunities also come out of the anthology format.
Each season assembles new principal cast. Major actors can commit to a single ten-episode season without the multi-year commitment that conventional series production requires. The format has attracted Billy Bob Thornton, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, Ewan McGregor, Carrie Coon, David Thewlis, Chris Rock, Jason Schwartzman, Jon Hamm, Juno Temple, and other accomplished performers whose participation conventional series production might not have secured.
The Connection To The Film
The series maintains specific connections to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film without requiring viewers to have seen the original.
The “based on a true story” opening claim that the film fabricated appears in each season of the series. The Minnesota and surrounding regional setting persists across all seasons. The tonal balance between regional comedy, serious dramatic content, and considerable violence carries forward from the film. The visual approach including snow cinematography, period production design, and naturalistic small-town imagery extends the film’s aesthetic.
Now and then, the show makes direct references to the film’s events. Season one features the buried suitcase of money that Steve Buscemi’s character had hidden in the 1996 film. Various other small details across seasons acknowledge the film’s continuity. The references are designed for audiences familiar with the film without preventing audiences who haven’t seen the film from engaging with the series independently.
The Coen Brothers have given the series their formal endorsement and serve as executive producers. The brothers don’t write or direct individual episodes. Their involvement legitimizes the series as a true extension of the Fargo property instead of as unauthorized franchise expansion. The relationship between film and series is one of the more successful examples of film-to-television franchise extension in American entertainment history.
Season One (2014)
The first season is set in 2006 in Bemidji, Minnesota. The season follows Lester Nygaard, a hapless insurance salesman whose life intersects with the mysterious drifter Lorne Malvo. The intersection produces a series of murders that small-town deputy Molly Solverson investigates. The season runs ten episodes and delivers complete narrative resolution.
Billy Bob Thornton played Lorne Malvo, and I think it’s the best villain work television has given us in the past decade.
Malvo is theatrically menacing, philosophically interesting and visually distinctive through Thornton’s haircut and dress choices. He’s the corrupting agent who shows Lester Nygaard what he’s capable of once someone gives him permission to act on his buried resentments, and every scene Thornton is in makes me nervous for whoever’s across the table. The performance won the Critics Choice Award and was nominated for the Emmy.
Martin Freeman played Lester Nygaard. The performance translates Freeman’s previous work in The Office and Sherlock into the Minnesota tone the series requires. Lester is a pathetic figure whose pathos masks major moral corruption. Freeman delivers the character with the kind of conviction that establishes the audience’s eventual horror at what Lester becomes. The performance was nominated for the Emmy.
Allison Tolman played Molly Solverson. The performance is one of the great unrecognized lead performances of the past decade.
Tolman brings the kind of competent Midwestern law enforcement tone that Frances McDormand had established in the original film. Molly is pregnant for heavy portions of the season. That reinforces the structural callback to the film. Tolman delivers the dignity, intelligence, and methodical investigative competence that the character requires. The performance was nominated for the Emmy.
Colin Hanks played Gus Grimly, the Duluth police officer whose initial encounter with Malvo produces lasting consequences. Bob Odenkirk played Bill Oswalt, Molly’s incompetent superior who consistently dismisses her investigation. Keith Carradine played Lou Solverson, Molly’s retired police officer father. The supporting cast depth is consistent across the season’s ten episodes.
Season Two (2015)
The second season is set in 1979 across South Dakota, Minnesota, and the wider regional landscape. It follows the Gerhardt crime family conflict with the rising Kansas City crime syndicate, with Sioux Falls police officer Lou Solverson investigating the resulting violence. The season is widely considered the strongest of the five and one of the great single seasons in prestige television history.
Patrick Wilson played the younger Lou Solverson, the same character Keith Carradine had played as an elderly man in season one. The casting connection between seasons is one of the series’ more elegant continuity choices. Wilson delivers the kind of restrained masculine competence that the character requires. Kirsten Dunst played Peggy Blumquist, a small-town beautician whose accidental murder of a Gerhardt heir triggers the wider conflict. Jesse Plemons played Ed Blumquist, Peggy’s butcher husband whose attempts to manage the consequences accelerate the violence.
Ted Danson played Hank Larsson, Lou’s father-in-law and the local sheriff. Jean Smart played Floyd Gerhardt, the matriarch of the Gerhardt crime family after her husband’s stroke.
Bokeem Woodbine played Mike Milligan, the Kansas City syndicate’s enforcer whose specific theatrical menace became one of the season’s defining elements. The supporting cast across the season is some of the strongest ensemble work in 2010s American television.
The season also makes one of the stranger choices in recent television.
UFO sightings and apparent extraterrestrial activity drift through the background of the season and never get explained. The choice divided audiences, and some viewers think it doesn’t belong in the Fargo aesthetic. I’m firmly in the other camp. I’m crazy about the nerve of dropping a flying saucer into a 1979 gang war and trusting the audience to live with it, and I read it as the period’s anxiety about outside threats made literal.
Season Three (2017)
The third season is set in 2010 in Minnesota. It follows the conflict between brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy, both played by Ewan McGregor, and the investigation by Eden Valley police chief Gloria Burgle. The season works inside psychological thriller tone more explicitly than previous seasons. The dual-McGregor performance is the season’s central craft achievement.
Ewan McGregor played both Emmit Stussy, the wealthy “Parking Lot King of Minnesota,” and Ray Stussy, the schlubby parole officer who resents his brother’s success. The dual performance requires McGregor to deliver two considerably different characters who share fraternal history. McGregor accomplishes the differentiation through specific physical choices including different weight distribution, different vocal patterns, and different posture. The performance won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Limited Series.
Carrie Coon played Gloria Burgle, the investigating police chief. The performance brings the kind of working-class Midwestern tone that the series consistently requires. Coon delivers real investigative competence and the moral seriousness that the role demands. David Thewlis played V. M. Varga, the British corporate criminal whose ambiguous identity and unsettling physical presence become the season’s most distinctive villain. Mary Elizabeth Winstead played Nikki Swango, Ray Stussy’s bridge-champion girlfriend whose intelligence and resourcefulness drive real portions of the season’s plot.
Varga gets one of the more memorable extended monologue sequences in recent television. Varga delivers an extended speech about the nature of capital, history, and political reality across multiple scenes. The content is dense political commentary that the season treats with suitable weight. The willingness to handle ideological content directly is one of the season’s distinctive achievements.
Season Four (2020)
The fourth season is set in 1950s Kansas City. The season follows the conflict between Black crime syndicate the Cannon Limited and Italian crime syndicate the Fadda family.
Chris Rock plays Loy Cannon, the head of the Cannon syndicate. Jason Schwartzman plays Josto Fadda, the underprepared heir of the Fadda family. The season is widely considered the weakest of the five aired seasons.
The season’s problems are partly structural, and they lose me a little.
Moving from regional Minnesota to a historical Kansas City crime epic stretches the Fargo identity past what it can carry. The material about race relations in 1950s Kansas City is real, and it deserved better integration with the rest of the show than it got. The eleven-episode order hurts too. I’d have cut an episode and a couple of subplots and kept the ten-episode discipline the earlier seasons had.
The performances are competent. Chris Rock delivers serious dramatic work that his comedy career hadn’t previously suggested. Jason Schwartzman brings suitable hapless privilege to his role. Jessie Buckley plays Oraetta Mayflower, a serial-killing nurse whose subplot provides the season’s most distinctive theatrical menace. The supporting cast is consistent with what the series typically assembles. The result is a season that contains specific strong elements without quite cohering into the sustained achievement that other seasons delivered.
The fourth season also suffered from production complications related to the 2020 pandemic. The season had been shooting before the pandemic began and was forced to suspend production for several months before completing.
The disruption is visible across the season in ways that the wider production schedule hadn’t anticipated. It’s one of the more interesting cases of how pandemic conditions affected prestige television production during the 2020 broadcast year.
Season Five (2023)
The fifth season is set in 2019. The season follows Dorothy “Dot” Lyon, a small-town Minnesota housewife whose former marriage to North Dakota rancher Roy Tillman still threatens the life she has now. Juno Temple plays Dot. Jon Hamm plays Tillman. The season works inside contemporary crime thriller tone with serious political commentary about contemporary American religious patriarchy.
After the fourth season’s weaknesses, this season is a considerable recovery.
The return to Minnesota setting restores the regional grounding the brand requires. The contemporary period allows the series to engage current cultural material instead of working through historical recreation. The shorter runtime and tighter pacing return to the structural discipline that earlier seasons had maintained.
Juno Temple delivered one of the great television lead performances of 2023.
Her work as Dot combines true Midwestern tone with real commitment to a character who has constructed her current life around the secret of her former marriage. Jon Hamm plays Roy Tillman as the kind of contemporary religious patriarchal authority figure that current American politics has produced. The performance is one of Hamm’s most committed post-Mad Men dramatic work.
Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Lorraine Lyon, Dot’s wealthy mother-in-law whose financial resources and theatrical menace produce the season’s most distinctive supporting character. Joe Keery plays Gator Tillman, Roy’s incompetent son whose attempts to handle the family’s violence accelerate the situation’s collapse. Sam Spruell plays Ole Munch, a mysterious five-hundred-year-old figure whose ambiguous nature provides the season’s supernatural undercurrent.
The Visual Approach
Visually, the show keeps the aesthetic the Coen Brothers’ film had established. The Minnesota and surrounding regional setting receives consistent visual treatment across seasons. The winter landscapes provide the recurring snow cinematography that the film had pioneered. The small-town production design depicts accurate regional architecture, signage, and material culture. The period seasons handle their historical settings with major production design investment.
Each season also develops specific visual signatures that distinguish it from other seasons. Season one uses the same general visual approach as the film. Season two develops a more saturated 1970s color palette.
Season three works inside more restrained contemporary visual aesthetics. Season four constructs the 1950s Kansas City world through heavy period production design. Season five returns to contemporary Minnesota visual treatment.
The cinematography across the series is consistently strong. Multiple cinematographers have worked on the production across different seasons. The visual quality maintains the standard that the film established without strict adherence to specific visual techniques. The variation across seasons is part of the anthology approach that allows each season to develop its own visual identity within the wider series structure.
For Writers
Fargo shows the value of anthology structure for sustaining prestige television quality across multiple seasons. Conventional serialized television requires writers to maintain character and plot continuity across multiple years. The accumulating obligations typically degrade quality as production progresses. Each successive season has to manage the choices the previous seasons made while also generating new dramatic content. The anthology structure eliminates the continuity obligations. Each season can be designed for maximum quality without reference to previous seasons’ constraints.
The result is a series that’s maintained higher consistent quality than most contemporary serialized productions. The lesson for writers is that structural choices about how stories accumulate over time have real effects on long-term quality. Anthology structures allow refreshing without abandoning the wider brand identity. Serialized structures require ongoing management of accumulated material. Writers planning long-form work should consider which structural approach best supports the work they want to produce.
The Tonal Achievement
Season after season, the show maintains the tonal balance between regional comedy, serious dramatic content, and serious violence that the Coen Brothers’ film had established. The achievement is unusual in contemporary television. Most prestige television productions emphasize one tonal tone at the expense of others. Fargo handles multiple tones at the same time across runtimes that exceed two hundred hours of cumulative material.
The comedy is the real thing. Scenes across all five seasons get actual laughs out of regional speech, incompetence exposed in casual conversation and ironies the audience spots before the characters do.
The violence sits right beside it and carries full weight. Murders aren’t shrugged off as jokes, and violence isn’t played for shock. That mix is what I treasure most about the show. I can laugh at a man’s accent and wince at his death inside the same scene, and very few series have ever pulled that off.
The dramatic content is also considerable. The series engages with class conflict, racial dynamics, family inheritance, religious patriarchy, capital and labor, and other serious themes across different seasons. The political content isn’t heavy-handed. The themes emerge through character action and specific dramatic situations instead of through expository dialogue. The result is a series that handles serious material without becoming polemical about it.
The Cultural Standing
Fargo has accumulated major cultural standing across its decade of broadcast. The series has won multiple Emmy Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and critics’ awards across its run and has been consistently included in best-of-the-decade lists for 2010s American television. It has maintained audience interest across five seasons without significant decline in critical reception.
Later television production also shows the series’ influence. Later prestige television productions have adopted the anthology structure. True Detective, American Crime Story, and other productions have followed approaches that Fargo showed could work commercially and critically. The Fargo influence on contemporary prestige television approaches has been heavy.
Fargo occupies the unusual position of being film adaptation that’s considerably extended the cultural reach of its source. Most film-to-television adaptations either fail commercially or are minor extensions of the source film’s brand.
Fargo has become a rare success story in film-to-television franchise expansion. The series has likely reached more total viewers than the original film, despite the film’s real commercial and critical reception.
For Writers
The Fargo television franchise shows the value of refreshing established properties through anthology instead of through serialized extension. Each season tells a complete story with different characters in a different time period. The anthology structure eliminates the continuity obligations that serialized television typically accumulates across multiple seasons. The franchise can maintain quality because each season is designed for maximum achievement without reference to previous seasons’ constraints. The lesson for writers planning long-form television is that anthology structures often produce stronger sustained quality than serialized approaches.
Later productions including True Detective and American Crime Story have followed comparable approaches with varying success. Writers should consider whether their long-form material would benefit from anthology refresh instead of serialized extension.
For Writers
The Fargo television series handles regional Minnesota culture with sustained respect instead of with the condescending mockery that lesser productions routinely deploy. Noah Hawley draws on the Coen Brothers’ established structure while adding serious period and regional research that later seasons have built on. The approach produces work that Minnesota audiences and broader audiences accept as honest depiction instead of as outsider caricature. The lesson for writers depicting regional or working-class culture is that real respect produces stronger work than condescending humor.
Audiences across multiple demographics respond more positively to accurate regional treatment than to caricature that signals outsider perspective. The Fargo series is one of the example cases for how regional cultural depiction should function in contemporary television production.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Noah Hawley’s Fargo is the example case for what showrunner-driven prestige television can accomplish when the showrunner has considerable creative authority and the wider institutional environment supports the creative vision. Noah Hawley had been working as a novelist and television writer before the project. He brought literary tone to the showrunning approach that broadcast television showrunners typically don’t deploy. FX provided the institutional environment that supported his vision across multiple seasons. The Coen Brothers provided the source legitimacy that allowed the series to extend their film’s reach.
The combination of showrunner talent, institutional support, and source legitimacy produced a consistently strong prestige television achievement. The lesson for writers is that successful long-form television depends on multiple aligned factors. Showrunner talent alone is insufficient. Institutional support alone is insufficient. Source material alone is insufficient. The combination of all three produces work that maintains quality across runtimes that exceed what any single element could sustain.
Identifying when these factors align and securing the position to take advantage of the alignment are among the more important strategic decisions any television writer can make.
Is Fargo (FX Series, 2014-present) worth watching?
A 10+/10. Fargo is among the best television series of the past fifteen years and a hugely ambitious anthology production in American television history. Noah Hawley delivered showrunner work that’s sustained quality across five seasons and over two hundred hours of cumulative material. The casting across seasons has assembled some of the most accomplished American film and television performers of the past two decades.
The visual approach has maintained the regional Minnesota aesthetic the Coen Brothers’ film established while allowing each season to develop its own visual identity. The tonal balance between comedy, drama, and violence has remained consistent at levels that few television productions have matched.
Season two is the strongest of the five and one of the great single seasons in prestige television history.
Season one is essential viewing for understanding what the series is. Season three delivers the dual-Ewan McGregor performance that established the third season as major achievement. Season five is a heavy recovery from the weaker fourth season. Audiences interested in prestige American television should pursue the series. The anthology structure means audiences can enter at any season. The film isn’t required viewing despite being the source.
It’s a 10+ because Hawley kept finding new stories in the same snow and never once cheapened the film he started from. Season four is the only stretch that tests my patience, and even that season has Chris Rock and Jessie Buckley doing work I wouldn’t trade. Seasons one, two and five rank with the best television I know, and a show that good across that many years deserves every bit of the plus sign.
