Recently I listened to several podcasts from TV Critics instructing its listeners on how to view the upcoming pilot of the new FX show Fargo, which is: Whatever you do, don't compare it the movie Fargo. While the Coen brothers sit as two of the show's Executive Producers, the characters and plot loosely rely on the movie's story, and the show itself is set in frozen Minnesota... that's about where it ends.
Jerry Lundegaard, (William H. Macy) is essentially replaced with Lester Nygaard, (played by Martin Freeman) whose plights border only on a few similarities. For one, Jerry Lundegaard, while not the brightest bulb, at least had a direct plan to get out of his present financial predicament. Lester is just unhappy, bad at his job and doesn't claim any responsibilities to the situations he finds himself in. (And may I say, Martin Freeman does a terrible impersonation of a Minnesotan. I thought Southern accents were hard, but c'mon, eh?)
Lester meets Lorne Malvo, (Billy Bob Thornton) who's like a weird hybrid of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men and some mythic, yet comedic character from an old Looney Toons rerun. You were supposed to fear him, yet be able to laugh with him. I suppose this is a page from the Coen brothers character playbook. Yet I don't believe I, well, believed Lester. (Loved him failing to deliver an eerie and foreboding message to Colin Hanks' character later in Deluth, "Thar be dragons...")
At any rate, Lester and Lorne meet while waiting to be seen in a hospital for different head injuries. Lester relays his reason for sustaining his injury, (an old High School bully still, somehow, tormenting him in his adulthood) and Lorne, being that he's a Hit Man, offers to take care of this situation for him. While no authority was given, Lorne takes it upon himself to complete this job with seemingly no ulterior motive other than, perhaps, he's standing up for the little guy. We see this later as he implores the kid working at the motel to pee in his boss' gas tank, but then immediately gets him in trouble for it. Perhaps we are to believe that Lester is the kid holding the magnifying glass over the anthill.
We meet other characters along the way including the Chief of Police and the other officers working under him. Like Bob Odenkirk, (!!!!) and Molly Solverson, a woman we know will eventually take his job when the time comes. (This is what's called foreshadowing...)
The trouble doesn't stop for Lester, clearly, after his bully is found dead in the local strip club and he'll soon by implicated by the Chief of Police himself. Lester is bullied at home by his unhappy and dissatisfied wife for a great number of things: his inadequacy at work, his inadequacy in bed, his inadequacy at not being able to fix home appliances. And just when I thought this episode was going to pass by with just a few peaks and valleys, Lester totally kills his wife. Not just kills her, beats her body in with a hammer.
The gruesome scenes didn't end there as the first show of this limited season surprised its audience with some hard hits. The likable Chief of Police is shot in the back by Lorne while coming to confront Lester, leaving a pregnant wife at home. Lester, realizing he's about to be in quite a bit of trouble, fakes an accident by ramming his own head into a wall and is knocked out cold next to his brutally murdered wife in the basement.
I don't want to say that the show was made better because they filled it with violence in the third act, but they certainly fooled me in the direction it was going to take. While I wasn't riveted in the pilot by any means, I was impressed with FX taking another chance on a bold idea, (The Americans...). I'm looking forward to the remaining nine episodes in this limited season. And in surveying our vast and countless options in television programming recently, I really would say we're looking at the Golden Age: Pt Deux.
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