Faced with a disappointing season of a beloved series, the television critic is tempted to avoid rigid judgments. Hence, perhaps, the commentariat’s unsettled response to Fargo, now in the midst of a new 11-episode run on FX. For Judy Berman at Time, the show’s latest installments are “fascinating but uneven,” a “frustrating” watch from which she nevertheless “couldn’t look away.” For the Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg, the new episodes contain “sweeping swathes of greatness” despite the presence of “ambitions that aren’t fully realized.” As a visit to Rotten Tomatoes reveals, these are representative sentiments rather than outliers. Alas, they and their kindred appraisals are nonsense. The fourth season of Noah Hawley’s Coen-inspired crime dramedy is not just inferior to its predecessors but actively terrible.
Fargo’s problems begin with its cast of characters, a Noahic assemblage from which plots emerge a dozen at a time rather than two by two. Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) heads an all-black criminal enterprise that means to displace the resident mafia in 1950s Kansas City. Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) and his brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito of Sky Italia’s Gomorrah) must wrestle for control of their own organization before they can turn their attention outward. Though this central gangland narrative is relatively coherent and entertaining, Hawley and company struggle to emphasize it sufficiently amid the clamoring of its many rivals. A show that leaned more heavily on the schemes of the syndicates’ leaders might have made for good television. (Note, for example, a lively scene in which Cannon invents and attempts to market the credit card.) As things stand, however, the clash that is ostensibly Fargo’s chief subject feels like one more apple bobbing in a crowded barrel.
Drawing the dramatic focus elsewhere is a collection of storylines almost too numerous to catalog. The first involves the members of the mixed-race Smutny family, who operate a failing mortuary and are seemingly in debt to Cannon and his associates. While Thurman Smutny (Andrew Bird) and his wife, Dibrell (Anji White), are afflicted by both their finances and the arrival of Dibrell’s prison-escapee sister (Karen Aldridge), their daughter Ethelrida (E’myri Crutchfield) is the picture of normalcy, an eager student who muses about the immigrant experience and trades barbs with a cheerfully racist neighbor (Jessie Buckley).
Similarly emphasized are the investigations of lawmen Odis Weff (Jack Huston) and Dick “Deafy” Wickware (Timothy Olyphant), who inevitably cross paths with the crime families’ various lieutenants and hangers-on. Among these peripheral gangsters is Rabbi Milligan (Ben Whishaw), an Irish turncoat with a dubious connection to the Italian Faddas. Serving as Cannon’s consigliere is the ambitiously named Doctor Senator (The Wire’s Glynn Turman), whose early scenes involve the hostile takeover of an enemy-held slaughterhouse.
If mapping so populous a village is a task for a master cartographer, Hawley and his fellow screenwriters are the equivalents of children drawing with crayons. Through the first four episodes of the current run, Fargo’s secondary characters are so poorly developed that I couldn’t have named more than two or three of them without assistance and was frequently given to asking a plot-idiot’s helpless questions. (“Why is that guy with them?”) Even more dissatisfactory is the show’s acting. Ever since Rock’s enlistment was announced more than two years ago, fans of the series have wondered whether the comedian could pull off a rare dramatic role. So tediously quirky are this season’s supporting performances, however, that viewers are in the odd position of wanting more time with a strikingly imperfect lead. That Rock occasionally fails to stifle his trademark smirk is undeniable. At least he isn’t weirdly chipper, grossly flatulent, or inclined to breathy, obsessive-compulsive singing.
Readers may fairly wonder at this point whether I am simply the wrong man to be reviewing so stylized a program, unreceptive as I seem to be to its rhythms and tone. In fact, I rank the first three seasons of Fargo among the best television of the past several years and am legitimately startled to see a showrunner of Hawley’s talent produce such bad work. One could argue, with some success, that the present episodes merely lack the casting chops that made the first three seasons so memorable. (Martin Freeman, Patrick Wilson, and Carrie Coon are extraordinary small-screen actors. For three years, Hawley got lucky.) Yet the better assessment may be that the new season falls short because Fargo’s improbable balance has finally wobbled. Like the Coen brothers’ film that inspired it, the television program has always been a self-consciously jokey affair. What’s missing in this season is the moral complexity with which the show once offset its exaggerated Midwestern hooey.
Lamentably, what has replaced that seriousness of purpose is a worn-out and predictable racial-grievance leitmotif that would have been tiresome even if its arrival hadn’t coincided with a period of national racial upheaval. Television needn’t always be escapist, obviously, but must we really hear woke youngster Ethelrida Smutny ponderously quoting Frederick Douglass in voice-over? Or Loy Cannon delivering such “1619 Project” clunkers as “I’m fighting 400 years of history?”
It is conceivable, of course, that what we’ve witnessed thus far is only a slow start — that Hawley will shake off his infirmity and bring his dreary stories to gripping resolution. To audience members who stick with Fargo in that hope, I wish nothing but the best of luck. But I suspect that Law & Order reruns would be more fun.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
