Looks like Fargo season five will be kinda crap

I have enjoyed many of the Coen Brothers' movies. Some of them I have watched repeatedly, as they are some of my favorite movies of all time. I love The Hudsucker Proxy, True Grit, No Country for Old Men, MIller's Crossing, Fargo, and Raising Arizona, and am a fan, to one degree or another, of most of their other films. I won't get into exact rankings, because it's hard to pick a favorite, and it's a whole can or worms to discuss their merits or one's own personal preferences. Suffice it to say, I have admired their work for a long time.

Which brings us neatly to the FX series based on the universe of characters and situations they created. "Fargo" the TV series was brilliantly executed for three full seasons, with exciting stories and meaningful characters. Then season four came along and dragged it through the mud. The characters were one-dimensional; either flawlessly good, or cartoonishly evil. This is without even getting into the sociopolitical subtext of that season, which was about as subtle as a sledgehammer. If you've seen season four, you know what I mean. I happily watched the first three seasons twice, but I could barely stomach the fourth season with its preachy, overstated message-happy pablum.

Now that the fifth season has started, I have an early analysis of the two episodes I've seen so far. The first episode started with a rather poorly-choreographed fight scene at a school meeting. If the idea was to show the milquetoast little housefrau accidentally getting herself arrested, they could have gone about it a dozen different ways that didn't involve that ham-fisted sequence. The introduction of the rich, gun-toting in-laws is once again very direct messaging about the political message they want to send. Then there is the ripoff of the movie kidnapping in which the housewife fights back against the attackers. It's one thing to pay loving homage to the franchise, but this is just slapping a coat of paint on a stolen vehicle.

The silent, weird, spooky bad guy is a trope they have overused, so this Dutch boy haircut-having, kilt-wearing, odd-accent-affected boogeyman is less scary and more pointless. By the second episode, you have Jon Hamm as a cardboard cutout of every corrupt sheriff, and the political lines are drawn VERY clearly. I am not optimistic about the future of this show.

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anonymous Other November 27, 2023 at 3:23 pm 0 0