We’re talking all five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo on our latest subscriber-only episode. This is a good one!

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carlar Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.

The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.

I went long on the end of Fargo Season 5 for Decider. (You can skip the servicey bits if that’s not your thing.)

When it comes to men, I have a type. Fortunately for me, this type of man is common across the Prestige TV space: The Hound on Game of Thrones, Richard Harrow on Boardwalk Empire, Wild Bill Hickok on Deadwood, and Hanzee Dent on our very own Fargo. Simply put, I like men who have been absolutely immiserated by how good they are at killing people. 

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I say that whether they live or die, these characters rarely have a happy ending waiting for them. Their line of work is both physically dangerous and emotionally poisonous, making emotional survival difficult even if literal survival is achieved. That’s what makes these men such tragic figures: They are capable of seeing all this, but they’ve despaired of changing it. As Wild Bill told Charlie Utter in Deadwood: “Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?”

I reviewed the excellent finale of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

Fargo loves a good misdirect. Remember the bit in this week’s episode — “The Useless Hand,” the penultimate episode of the show’s stellar fifth season — where Dorothy opens up all the gas valves on Roy Tillman’s stove? You anticipate fireworks that never come. Roy smells the gas, stops one of his dipshit minions from lighting a cigarette, turns off the stove, has the boys open all the doors and windows, boom, problem solved. 

All the gambit manages to do is tip Roy off that Dorothy has been in the house, which he honestly might have eventually guessed anyway. (He’s very quick to figure out she’s hiding someplace she thinks they wouldn’t expect.) And he would have figured that out the moment he went up to his bedroom and found his wife knocked out cold — not that the sight gives him a second’s thought of stopping his hunt to help the woman when he does stumble across her. Not our Roy!

The point is that neither expected outcome, neither the worst nor the best, comes to pass. The gas doesn’t make or break Dorothy’s escape attempt. She doesn’t kill Roy with it, and she doesn’t get killed because of it. (It’s a close call in the end, but again, it would have been a close call regardless.) The show just wants you to think something might happen. Creator Noah Hawley, who wrote this episode, constructed the show’s entire approach to action and suspense around allowing the viewer’s mind to spin as fast as it can for as long as it can before he finally lowers the boom. 

Later in the episode, state trooper Whit Farr warns the task force of feds and state cops he’s assembled to rescue Dorothy not to shoot at her even if she appears armed and dangerous, which she almost certainly will. “This story,” he tells them, “will not end with us crushing the victim with the helping hand.” Puts an idea into your head, doesn’t it? Doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but slides it right in there nonetheless. And there it will stay for one more week. You can rotate it in your mind like a cube if you want. I’m pretty sure Noah Hawley wants you to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF FARGO AHEAD

Danish falls victim to one of the central schisms of this season, which is the split on the political right wing between the true believers, like Roy Tillman, and the rich people, like Lorraine, who think they’re just using the true believers to keep their taxes low. Danish thinks he knows which side is really in charge, but Roy is the man with the gun, and he thinks otherwise.
You definitely have a sense with Jennifer’s character, Lorraine, that there’s still humanity in her. She cares about her family, and wants to protect them, so it’s at least as far as that. Obviously she’s willing to destroy other people’s lives in service of that goal without any real compunction.

But then you have Jon’s character, who believes he’s empowered by God, and therefore infallible. And can commit murders, randomly, constantly! He believes that if a man’s intentions are pure, everything he does is right, which is a much more dangerous mindset. It’s a psychopathy: You are incapable of feeling empathy, feeling any guilt or remorse for any of your actions, no matter how heinous, because you know, for a fact, you’re right in everything you do.

It reminded me of this fascinating little moment earlier in the season, where Danish is trying to leave Lorraine’s compound, but one of the security guards he himself hired won’t let him leave until he shows ID. It doesn’t make any sense, but the guard has the gun, so he makes the rules.
The power Danish thinks he has is illusory. All his power stems from Lorraine, he doesn’t have any power that’s vested in him, but he thinks he does. When the guard blocks him, it’s a little taste of what’s coming with Sheriff Roy.

When he sees Roy’s gun, in my mind, Danish is just disbelieving, because usually people are afraid of him. He’s like, “No, people are afraid of me! This isn’t gonna happen! He’s not gonna do this.” Right up until the moments the shots are fired, he still believes he has a fearsome presence.

Danish’s disbelief is so convincing that for a minute I didn’t believe it either. Roy pulls out his gun and I’m just like, Hmmm, what’s he getting at here?
[Laughs.] Then the misdirection worked! Good!

I interviewed Dave freaking Foley about Fargo for Vulture! Holy cow!

I had an absolute blast watching this episode, even when it made me feel like curling up and dying.

I reviewed this week’s fantastic episode of Fargo, our first early candidate for episode of the year, for Decider.

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

Social justice separatism is having a moment. On Yellowjackets, purple-clad adherents to the self-help group founded by plane crash survivor Lottie help the addicted and outcast find peace on their compound. On Mrs. Davis, a convent of fun-loving nuns holes up in an abandoned motel in the Nevada desert. On Foundation, a commune of psychically powered “mentallics” live a life free from persecution by the galaxy’s normies in their home on a distant planet. On The Changeling, a group of women forced to kill the demonic creatures that took the place of their children take refuge on an island off Manhattan accessible only via magic. And now, on Fargo, a community of abuse survivors perform cathartic puppet shows and take on the name of their founder: Roy Tillman’s first wife, and Nadine Tillman/Dorothy Lyon’s groomer, Linda.

Only…not really. Camp Utopia and its gang of Lindas are a figment of Dot’s exhausted, traumatized imagination. Their welcoming community in the woods, full of friendly, grinning women; their therapeutic punch-and-judy shows, in which newcomers tell their horrible stories using puppets they themselves design and build; and most importantly, Linda herself (Kari Matchett), the woman who “fed” Dorothy to Roy in order to escape herself, the woman who atoned for the sin of abandoning Dorothy and the then-salvageable Gator to Roy by helping untold numbers of other women, the woman who offers an apology (though not an explanation) that Dorothy finds she can accept…none of these things, none of these people, actually exist.

I’m fine with that. As an abuse survivor I bristle at the notion that surviving abuse confers upon you some kind of innate decency or dignity, as if abuse were a sacrament as well as a crime. As such, the Hollywood concept of the commune where the wounded gather together to grow stronger in the broken places or whatever has never held any appeal for me. I think it’s begun to exhaust its appeal in Hollywood as well, judging from how many of the above examples either subvert the trope or treat it as a literal fairy tale or dream.

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

Let’s talk about Jennifer Jason Leigh. Underneath the Locust Valley Lockjaw accent and the power suits she’s delivering a tremendous performance, lively and mischievous. She plays Lorraine Lyon as a character who relishes each opportunity to show off, to stunt, to exert power. You can all but see a little flicker of delight in her eyes when one arises. 

But in this episode I noticed a few more things. First, and I apologize that it took me this long to notice, she is insanely sexy in this role, holy moses. Lorraine’s self-confidence alone almost erotic in and of itself, as is the feeling that this is the last person on earth whose room-service breakfast order you’d ever want to take. Like, yes, exactly. I kind of think that her impenetrable exoskeleton of casual cruelty is the armor she needed to generate to make men leave her the fuck alone when she’s this magnetic a person.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

There’s one more conversation I want to highlight. When Danish exits the house, he’s stopped by a security guard, who demands to see his ID. Never mind the fact that Danish is leaving rather than arriving, that he’s the most instantly recognizable human being in Minnesota, or that he hired the guy: Orders are orders, and the man carrying the gun has been given orders, so Danish must show ID.

Now, Danish manages a “Don’t fucking do that to me again” afterwards that I think will actually take — he is the boss at the end of the day — but it’s a fascinating exchange nonetheless because it shows how power actually works. It’s as simple as Lord Varys’s old parable from Game of Thrones, about the soldier surrounded by a king, a priest, and a rich man, each of whom orders him to kill the others. Who has the power in that situation? Whomever the man with the sword believes has the power. 

Danish is rich. Danish has political clout, both via Lorraine and likely some of his own. But in that moment, the man with the gun does not believe Danish has the power, and thus he does not. Will Roy and Lorraine come to learn similar lessons?

I reviewed this week’s Fargo for Decider.

Roy’s terrifying speech to Lenore is an episode high for me, one of the two points in my notes where I simply wrote “ooooooh-wheeee.” The other is very different. It comes when Dot/Nadine visits Wayne in his hospital room (dodging Lorraine, Danish, Olmstead, and Farr in the process) after he awakens from his electrocution during the home invasion. While he’s barely coherent or aware of himself and his surroundings, she attempts to coach him into believing a sanitized version of what occurred, to no apparent success or failure. But it’s the way he smiles when he repeats the phrase “my wife,” as if he’s seeing her for the first time and can hardly believe his luck, that gets to him. “Move over, you,” she says finally, tears welling in her eyes, as she scoots him over to lie next to him and cuddle. Tears welled in my eyes too, let me tell you. Not a bad range of emotional experiences for one episode at all, no sir.

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Fargo for Decider.

Beyond that, though, Roy’s nipple rings, weed habit, and kinky penchant for having his wife roleplay as women he wants to punish during sex could be seen as the show scoring some cheap points about right-wing hypocrisy. (Not that such shots don’t hit the mark.) But it could just as easily be seen as a depiction of how to men like Roy, this isn’t hypocrisy. Roy is free to do what he wants, and the people of Stark County are also free to do what he wants — the completely consistent conservative definition of freedom in a nutshell.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

But the episode we get is a very good one. Once again, writer-director Hawley displays his facility for building tension and dread; the long take that includes the stabbing murder of Gator’s partner by Ole Munch feels endless, drawing out the sense that something terrible is going to happen before delivering on it. Jeff Russo’s score goes full horror movie in this scene as well, which helps immensely. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up my favorite homage in the episode: Jon Hamm getting out of the bath bare assed, à la Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Season 3. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so gander all you want.

I reviewed the second episode of Fargo Season 5 for Decider.

Two > > Three > One >> Four. There, that’s the extent to which we need to relitigate Noah Hawley’s Fargo. This love letter not just to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black-comedy crime classic but to their entire oeuvre is getting to that M*A*S*H point where it’s funny to point out how it’s outlasted its inspiration, but along the way it has aired one truly great season of television, two merely terrific ones, and one that would have gone over a lot better had poor Chris Rock not been miscast as a crime boss. That’s an excellent track record from where I’m sitting, even before you factor in Hawley’s acuity with action sequences, tension and suspense, weird eruptions of uncanny horror, getting gangbusters work out of a slew of fantastic actors both with and without prior Coens experience, you name it. So what if Hawley, on whom I run hot and cold as a rule, is not Joel and Ethan fused into one new guy? Voguish or not, if Fargo is on, I’m watching. 

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo for Decider. This season’s real good!

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I reunite for a second two-hour deep dive into television’s storied recent past! This time, the Original Bad Boy and the Filthcore Queen tackle shows they didn’t touch on before or only touched on briefly. Beginning with a trinity of canonical dramas—The Wire, Deadwood, and Mad Men—they then make the jump to anthology TV—Channel Zero, American Crime Story, and Fargo—with plenty of surprises along the way. It’s better than your most recent Netflix binge—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

But it’s Mike Milligan/Satchel Roy who must bear the weight of all this. It’s he who’s cursed to remember, he in whom the bloody history of this war is imprinted. And for the purposes of this episode, it renders him speechless. Who fits in and who is rejected? For whom is the power of violence sufficient to gain entry into the promised land? How many people must watch their loved ones die in front of them to feed the maw of the money machine? Mike has no history report to offer us. He stares out at the great American nowhere and fiddles with a gun and does nothing—and if that isn’t the “Storia Americana” that gives the episode its title, I don’t know what is.

I reviewed the season finale of Fargo for Decider. The final scene made the whole season for me.

In thinking about this episode, it’s the details that jump out at me, despite all the major goings-on. The black comedy of the cops explaining their presence in Oraetta’s apartment by simply saying “He woke up.” Oraetta’s taunting of Ethelrida: “What does it feel like to be so sure you’re right and nobody cares?” Josto and Gaetano literally bragging about the size of their dicks. (“Big like a pickle?” Gaetano asks his brother, quoting “The Humpty Dance” of all things.) The lovely slo-mo shots of strutting gangsters and lethal shootouts in the episode’s opening gang-war montage. Josto trying to lift his brother up affectionately and failing miserably. Josto’s baffled “What the fuck?” when Gaetano dies. Odis’s smile. Gaetano’s flapping skull. Loy’s forgery of a painting he grew fond of when he saw it in a magazine, and Ethelrida’s ability to identify it.

If this season of Fargo is to be considered a success, it’s in these little things, these images, these exchanges of dialogue—moments that accumulate and tell a story of their own, even if the big picture has yet to come together.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fargo Season Four for Decider.

Deliberately disorienting and strange, the better to mimic the world in which Satchel Cannon now finds himself alone, this episode of Fargo (“East/West”) is by far the season’s best. Coming as it does after the bloodbath of Episode 8, it relies less on sheer body count for its power than on the mysteries described above—the meta mysteries of why the show uses the techniques it does, the in-world mysteries of Satchel and Rabbi’s fellow guests at the Barton Arms hotel (it hardly needs to be said that this is a reference to Barton Fink, which is itself set largely in a strange hotel), and the general feeling that some horrible future awaits.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo, the season’s strangest and best to date, for Decider.

Now that the inevitable bloody explosion for which we’ve waited all season has taken place, it’s worth noting that three full episodes remain. Will we be looking at a protracted aftermath, or will the violence continue, or even ratchet up? Will Odis and Oraetta get their comeuppance? Will Josto’s scheming (he’s like a snake, in Gaetano’s admiring words) or Loy’s stoicism win the day? Will Zelmare seek revenge of her own? And what is to become of Ethelrida, the one decent person in the whole mess? With no righteous lawman or law-woman to anchor the action as in previous seasons, and an extra episode for creator and co-writer Noah Hawley to play with, the contours of the season’s denouement are unclear. I get the feeling, though, that Ethelrida isn’t the only character who can’t afford to make mistakes.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.