I don’t know where this season of Fargo is going; I just know I feel like I’m in expert hands on the way there.

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

I like art when it’s weirder than it needs to be. That historically has been one of the things I’ve liked best about Fargo: It’s weirder than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit extended flashback in Season One, or the prophetic dream soundtracked in part by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season Two, or V.M. Varga’s whole deal in Season Three. None of these things needed to be that way, but they were, because weirdness is where art lives.

Perhaps that’s why, in the least weird episode of Fargo Season Four to date, I keep thinking of the incredibly morose and shadowy birthday celebration (complete with creepy singing) that the Smutnys, fresh from the takeover of their family business by Loy Cannon, sing to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday to you, kid! It’s really weird around here!

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

The first thing we should talk about when it comes to this week’s episode of Fargo (“The Birthplace of Civilization”) is the last thing that happens in it. As the lights flicker and fade around the dead body of Loy Cannon’s consigliere Doctor Senator, shot dead by Gaetano Fadda’s button man Constant Calamita, Jeff Russo’s grandiosely melancholy Fargo theme—absent from the entire season until now—comes roaring in on the soundtrack. It’s as if series creator and episode co-writer (with Francesca Sloane) Noah Hawley is sending us a signal: The real show is about to begin.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.

But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo, which was a doozy, for Decider.

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you put an apple pie loaded with ipecac syrup on the table in the first act, you’d better use it to give a stickup artist uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the second. 

I reviewed last night’s eventful, scatalogical episode of Fargo for Decider.

Writer-director-creator Noah Hawley gets a lot of grief for reasons that don’t entirely make sense to me—look, I didn’t like Legion at all, but the dude’s not the devil—yet he has a knack for the little narrative filigrees that the almighty Coen Brothers weave into and out of their films, particularly the crime films with a darkly comedic edge. He also shares the Coens’ affinity for couples so odd it’s like they’re speaking a different language; cf. the Mutt-and-Jeff physicality of Gaetano and Josto, or the contrast between Gateano’s fiery youth and Doctor Senator’s smooth and serious experience, or Nurse Mayflower’s chatty but hard-edged relationship with the quietly sharp Ethelrida. And he’s certainly not above throwing in the occasional overt homage, like the cattle gun used by the slaughterhouse workers, a shoutout to Anton Chigurh’s modus operandi in No Country for Old Men.

But the Coen-ness of such details is just gravy, not the main course, which is the show’s deliberate pacing and slow ratcheting-up of stakes in anticipation of an eventual explosion. And language itself is often a pleasure on this show. Witness the brief exchange Loy Cannon and Rabbi Milligan have, when the latter tells the former he’s teaching his son that “dog eat dog” is the way the world works: “That’s how dogs work,” Cannon replies. “Men are more complicated.”

“Not in my experience,” Milligan counters.

Fargo feels like a roller coaster slowly cranking its way up an incline, waiting for the drop to come.

I reviewed the back half of Fargo‘s two-episode season premiere for Decider.

Ah, that Fargo feeling. A chill in the air and in the blood. An assemblage of eccentrics, drawn together by someone’s elaborate criminal scheme. A sense of time and place that does more than provide context, but traps the characters in amber, allowing for dispassionate observation of the fate they’re unable to escape. A shootout between fact and fiction, fake and real, the stories we tell ourselves and the true stories that underlie them. And split screens—lots of split screens.

Last sighted during the opening months of the Trump regime—a regime it anticipated and echoed with its grotesquely greedy modern-day gangster V.M. Varga—and returning now for, god willing, that regime’s final days, Noah Hawley’s Fargo is back, baby. And for a show that has fallen in and out of critical vogue so fast you can feel a slight breeze, it seems blithely unconcerned with being anything but Noah Hawley’s Fargo. It’s a loving tribute to the crime films of Joel and Ethan Coen, writing a melody in their signature key while improvising notes all its own. I’m thrilled to have it back. Aren’t you?

I’m covering Fargo for Decider this season, starting with my review of its fine season premiere.

2. The Young Pope: “Sexy and I Know It” by LMFAO

“Sexy and I Know It” is Paolo Sorrentino’s ambitious, emotional, confrontational series about an autocratic American-born pope in miniature. Granted, using LMFAO to represent your drama about faith, loneliness, power, corruption, and lies is a bit counterintuitive compared to, say, summing up Twin Peaks with a song from the Twin Peaks score. That’s the joke, in part: It’s very stupid, and therefore very funny, to watch the Holy Father dress up for his first address to the College of the Cardinals while Redfoo drawls about wearing a Speedo at the beach so he can work on his ass tan. Girl, look at that body … of Christ?!

But like so much of The Young Pope, there’s a much deeper and more serious meaning beneath the craziness and camp. To wit, the brand of tyrannical, uncompromising religion the pontiff formerly known as Lenny Belardo (Jude Law) embraces depends on craziness and camp. Look at the obscene decadence of his subsequent entrance to the Sistine Chapel, borne on a litter like an emperor of old. Listen to his megalomaniacal speech, demanding that the Church remake itself in his bizarre and imperious image. Watch how he demands his followers demonstrate their obedience by literally kissing his feet. It’s a contrast to the self-aware silliness of “Sexy and I Know It,” yes, but it’s a contrast achieved by taking that song’s boasts as deadly serious claims to superiority. He’s got passion in his pants and he ain’t afraid to show it. Spiritually speaking, anyway.

I wrote about the 10 best music cues on TV this year for Vulture. As is always the case with lists of this nature when I write them, it is objectively right and I shall brook no dissent.

The question facing us is simple. Does Varga walk away, or is he locked up? Will he exalt himself like the eagle and make his next among the stars, or will the Lord bring him down? Is Schrödinger’s metaphorical cat dead or alive? Is the ethical universe half-full or half-empty? The lady, or the tiger?

I want to focus on writer Frank R. Stockton’s extremely famous short story of that name here, because I think the ending of this episode will be similarly misconstrued. The gist of “The Lady, or the Tiger?” is simple enough: In ancient times, a barbaric king offers a condemned man a choice inside a gladiator-style arena where two doors stand before him. Behind one is a ravenous tiger that will devour him on the spot; behind the other is a beautiful woman who will marry him on the spot. The process is completely random, and the prisoner has a fifty-fifty chance of life or death. (“Call it.”)

At least that’s the version of the story you may recall from the dim recesses of memory of English classes gone by. In reality the situation’s a lot more complicated. For one thing, if you get lucky and wind up with the lady, the capricious king will insist you marry her no matter your previous familial commitments or romantic entanglements. Happily married already? Tough luck.

For another, the specific case at the center of the story is a unique one. The condemned man in question, described by the story’s narrator in a sardonic and self-aware voice not far removed from that of Fargo’s occasional voice-over commentators as “a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens,” has been sentenced to this ordeal for the crime of falling in love with the king’s daughter. Like her father, the princess is herself a barbarian by nature, and through sheer force of will has discovered the secret of what lies behind each door. But that same barbarian blood makes her intensely jealous of the other lady in the equation, to whom her suitor will be betrothed should he dodge that tiger-shaped bullet. It’s up to her to signal to the dude which door he should take, and up to us to guess whether she’s sent him to his death or to a life without her, a fate less bloody but possibly no less cruel, in the princess’ eyes anyway.

Apply these lessons to our current story, and the simple choice between good and evil we’re asked to make when we speculate about the outcome of Varga and Gloria’s meeting becomes way less simple.

I reviewed the finale of Fargo Season Three, and quite possibly Fargo itself, for Decider. I think it’s a far more complex episode than surface readings of its ending give it credit for, and I think overall it may be the season that haunts me most.

I’ve enjoyed season three of Fargo so much for so many reasons that I’ve barely had the time or inclination to comment on the few things that haven’t quite clicked. Now’s as good a time as any, since the clicking has finally occurred. Basically, Ewan McGregor’s performance(s) have been one of the season’s few weak links. He’s never been bad as either Emmit or Ray Stussy; I don’t think he has it in him to deliver a bad performance straight-up. But I’ve gotten the sense from time to time of an actor clinging to his wigs as a sort of life raft, the only way he can navigate the choppy waters of playing two superficially similar but very different characters, who look alike, in an accent completely alien from his own. (He’s not as bad as, say, Peter Dinklage trying to be posh, but the Scottish texture of McGregor’s voice is hard for him to disguise completely when he plays American, as viewers—or in my case, triple-digit re-viewers—of his work in Velvet Goldmine could tell you.)

There were already signs that this was ending in the last couple of episodes. Think of the way he ranted and raved about the travails of the One Percent during his lunch meeting with Mrs. Goldfarb after he accidentally killed his brother, a convincingly inappropriate and desperate coping mechanism. Or the cast of his face as he waved down to Sy Feltz for what he may well have known was their last moment of genuine human connection. Or his guilt-stricken panic when Nikki and Wrench began taunting him with the detritus of he and his brother’s history. The accent is the accent, but underneath a person was emerging.

In this week’s episode, “Aporia,” that person emerged in full. It happened during his beautifully framed confession of murder to Gloria Burgle—less “just the facts” than a rambling, time-jumping journey through his entire sorry relationship with his kid brother Ray. It’s one of those moments where you can see an actor seizing the best stuff he’s been given all season, like a swimmer surfacing for that first big fresh gulp of air.

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

This is the one you’ve been waiting for. Whether you’ve been one of Fargo Season Three’s inexplicably large number of skeptics or singing its praises from the jump, this is the episode that either puts paid to your criticism or pays off your faith. It’s called “Who Rules the Land of Denial?”, and it features the season’s best action/thriller sequences, its goriest crimes, its biggest surprises, its most striking cinematography, and its most direct trafficking in the uncanny.

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

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.”

—Robert Anton Wilson

“For Pete’s sake, hon, what’s wrong?”

“The world. The world is wrong. It looks like my world, but everything is different.”

—Esther and Sy Feltz

I don’t know about you, but over the past few years I’ve had this conversation with my loved ones almost verbatim, tears and all. The world is wrong, isn’t it? For almost all of us? Maybe it’s depression or anxiety or trauma or some other mental illness that makes it feel that way. Maybe it’s the neoliberal nightmare of late capitalism and the rapacious gangsters in suits who’ve seized the opportunity to milk us all dry. For me it’s both, but who’s counting? And who, really, can separate the two? Seven episodes deep, Fargo Season 3 remains a slippery thing, the shape of its final act unclear, a far cry from the escalation toward the preordained Sioux Falls Massacre that gave Season 2 its irresistible momentum. But man oh man, this part is as solid and heavy as a stone. This is a true story.

I reviewed last week’s Fargo for Decider.

My working theory at this point is that V.M. Varga is a clear and present danger primarily to the weak and stupid and easily cowed — to the Rays and Nikkis of the world, who can’t shoot straight (or at all; think of what might have been avoided had Nikki not come up with the oh so brilliant idea of not letting Ray shoot Varga and his minions to death when he had the chance); or to the Emmits and Sy Feltzes of the world, so comfortable and successful living according to their own code of conduct that the introduction of someone playing by entirely different rules catches them completely flat-footed. But in the person of Gloria Burgle, he may have encountered an enemy too dogged and determined and just plain lucky to give this wolf a run for his mutton. What else do they have in common besides their mutual interest in the Stussy brothers, after all? Like Varga, Gloria is a ghost in the machine.

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

If “The House of Special Purpose” demonstrates anything it’s how bad things are getting, and how fast they’re getting there. God bless the silence, restraint, and deliberately painstaking pacing of crime shows like Better Call Saul and The Americans, but there’s something cathartic about watching everything collapse as quickly as possible. In this episode alone, Emmit loses his wife over a fake sex tape Ray and Nikki record in a failed blackmail attempt; he blows up at Sy and risks their friendship; Ray realizes the cops are on to his involvement in Ennis Stussy’s murder; Emmit learns the IRS is investigating him due to Ray’s “withdrawal” from Emmit’s personal account while in disguise;  Varga goes apeshit on Sy in his oily way; and Varga’s hired muscle beat Nikki to a pulp. The best thing that happens to anybody is that Sy’s meeting with the Widow Goldfarb, a potential buyer and thus lifeline from Varga’s depredations, isn’t a total fiasco.  “You’re supposed to be a fixer!” Emmit barks at Sy in the middle of all this. “Nothing’s fixed. Everything’s broken.” That’s about the size of it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider. In the review spend a bunch of time writing about Nikki Swango, a curveball of a character.

Varga’s theory of human behavior is expressed via a memorable metaphor: bulimia. Twice in this episode, we see him in his deliberately shabby suit, gorging on rich food, then heading for the bathroom and bringing it all back up. (The handkerchief he neatly unfolds to protect the knees of his pants from the men’s room floor is a lovely little shoutout to the similar ritual performed by the Faulkneresque alcoholic writer W.P. Mayhew in Barton Fink.) Consume all you want — just don’t dare to leave a trace of it where people can see.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo, which more or less argues that wealth is inherently immoral, for Decider.

Hawley tapped John Cameron, a longtime collaborator of both the Coens and their old friend Sam Raimi, to helm one of the series most Coen-esque installments ever, which is really saying something. (Un)comfortably ensconced in Los Angeles rather than the upper midwest, Fargo could really bring its Barton Fink/Big Lewbowski A-game, with some of its most explicit shout-outs and hat-tips yet. For example, the “ring for service” bell that never seems to stop ringing, the shot of Gloria reclining on the beach looking out into the sea, the mysterious shoes and the equally mysterious box, the screening room lit by the hazy light of the projector, Tad’s role as a screenwriter whose success in another medium leads him to get in over his head in Hollywood: That’s that Barton Fink feeling, baby, brought to you by filmmakers who understand the feelings of alienation and insecurity they’re supposed to engender in you, not just by people who are trying to coast on the residual goodwill of previous work with throwaway references.

In some places the allusions seem to fold endlessly into one another — Gloria’s motel simultaneously evokes Barton Fink’s hotel, the motel that figures prominently in No Country for Old Men, and the site of the Sioux Falls Massacre from the show’s previous season — to say nothing of cinema’s ur-motel, run by one Norman Bates and his mother. The emotional resonance here is dense, is what I’m saying; unlike some shows I could mention — fuck it, I mean Stranger Things — it’s designed to last beyond the mere fact of recognition. In other words, to paraphrase Barton Fink, it will show you the life of the mind.

Despite not caring fro two prominent aspects of last week’s Fargo, I liked the overall thing quite a bit, and explained why at Decider. (That cameo from you-know-who!)

We live in a world run by racist monsters who would gladly murder your children in front of you if it meant an extra zero for their net worth, so you have to take your pleasure where you can get it, and I get it from Shea Whigham. Best known to fans of excellent crime dramas for his role as Eli Thompson on Boardwalk Empire — the Ray Stussy to Steve Buscemi’s Emmit-like Nucky Thompson, basically — he slowly but surely became one of my favorite things about that show: a character so consumed by his own failures that you could hear it in his voice like a speech impediment and watch it seep out of his face like five o’clock shadow. He’s only in “The Principle of Restricted Choice,” this week’s episode of Fargo, briefly. And he’s delivering the sort of angry-police-chief comic relief familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a cop show, chewing out recently demoted Gloria Burgle and her deputy for operating their podunk department (now absorbed into the county’s police force) from a meeting room in the public library, using a storeroom for a prison cell and eschewing computers entirely. We live in the future, he insists, and she’d better get with the program. If the future includes more of this gravelly voiced actor with a face like a stern Renaissance aristocrat, I’m fucking in.

Don’t believe the anti-prestige-TV hype part 3: I reviewed this week’s marvelous Fargo for Decider.

Fargo Season Three has arrived, and Noah Hawley is back on his bullshit.

After the weightless sci-fi psychedelia of Legion — a seemingly sincere but ultimately empty exercise in the superhero genre — the writer/director/showrunner has returned to the moral snowdrifts of the Upper Midwest for the third season of Fargo. The sudden chill has done him good. Legion did all sorts of rad tricks with lighting, editing, cinematography, narrative structure, and found-music pop-rock soundtracking, but for all its freneticism the end result was inert; tied to a hoary X-Men x-tended-universe story about a crazy telepathic mutant and his not-as-creepy-as-it-could-have-been psychic parasite, it felt like stagecraft rather than communication.

But as an East German interrogator puts it in the flashback (?) prologue to “The Law of Vacant Places,” Fargo S3’s season premiere, “We are not here to tell stories. We are here to tell the truth. Understand?” This is followed by the show’s usual “THIS IS A TRUE STORY” chyron — but Hawley, directing from his own script, then fades out the word “TRUE,” and eventually leaves nothing behind but “STORY.” This is already a far more effective disquisition on the difference between “true” and “real” than a season’s worth of Legion astral-plane hallucinations, because it’s rooted (literally — the words are overlaid across a shot of bare winter trees) in places and people rather than in an ersatz examination of The Mind or what have you. No matter how much Fargo owes to the Coen Brothers’ quirk-noir classic and the rest of their black-comedy crime films (some more black than comedy, some more comedy than black), it comes down to murder — the story of human bodies and what they’re capable of doing to one another. Here, heads are far more likely to get smashed by a falling air conditioner than explored like a memory palace.

I reviewed the season premiere of Fargo, which I enjoyed a great deal, for Decider. I’ll be covering the show there all season. Please do not believe a word of the backlash you may have seen to the show this season, which when compared to the freakout for Legion provides the clearest illustration I’ve ever seen of how TV critics overreact to novelty over quality. The stars of Trainspotting, Naked, A Serious Man, and The Leftovers are now all on the same show. If you suspect it’ll be good, congrats, you win.

TWIN PEAKS

Showtime, May 21

“I’ll see you again in 25 years”: Ok, so the ghost of Laura Palmer may have wound up being off by a year or so when she uttered these immortal words to Agent Dale Cooper. But hey, better late than never. As it stands, the return of David Lynch and Mark Frosts’s seminal small-town–noir series – arguably the most influential show for TV’s New Golden Age – will pick up with much of the original cast, including Kyle MacLachlan as Coop and Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne, in tow; everyone from Laura Dern to Trent Reznor and Eddie Vedder are slated for cameos. The original Peaks was both heartbreakingly empathetic and pants-pissingly scary; there’s no reason to expect the Lynch-directed Season Three won’t follow suit. STC

I wrote about Twin Peaks, Game of Thrones, Fargo, The Handmaid’s Tale, Iron Fist and more for Rolling Stone’s list of the 25 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2017.

When it comes to television soundtracks, there are good music cues, and there are great music cues, and Fargo Season Two has had plenty of both. And then, my friends, there’s “War Pigs.” Black Sabbath’s orgiastic antiwar anthem enters “Palindrome,” the show’s stunning season finale, as a literal nightmare—an accompaniment to Betsy Solverson’s vision of a glorious future of Costcos and Game Boys and family dinners, shattered by the hatred and violence that runs so deep in this land’s veins it’s unlikely to ever be pumped clean. It’s a fucking mighty moment, a sign that showrunner Noah Hawley, director Adam Arkin, and company have an unshakeable grasp of the themes of their show and the period pop-culture they’ve used to advance them. And it’s a prophetic moment as well. The song foretells the day of judgment when the rulers responsible for the slaughter are made to answer for their crimes, as all their plans and strategies come to naught. If you want a picture of the future for the characters we’ve spent the season following, from kings and conquerors to victims and vanquished, you’ve got one.

I reviewed the Fargo Season 2 finale for the New York Observer. This was really some season.