This review was published on November 21, 2023. Fargo’s fifth season has since received 15 nominations for the 2024 Emmy Awards. Read all of Vulture’s Emmy-race coverage here.
Each of the first four seasons of Fargo, FX’s anthology series inspired by the 1996 Coen brothers movie, is set during a different decade — first the mid-aughts, then the late 1970s, then the early 2010s and the early 1950s — enabling every one of creator Noah Hawley’s stand-alone Midwestern crime sagas to exist within its own cultural context. In season five, however, for the first time in Fargo’s run, that cultural context is right now.
Okay, technically, by the finest of split hairs, this volume of Fargo is a period piece like all the others; it takes place in the fall of 2019. But those last weeks of the pre-COVID era are as close to the present moment as it’s possible to get without actually existing in it. The issues that Hawley and his team weave into the narrative — abuses of power in the name of “freedom,†distrust and corruption of the government, the complete breakdown of civil discourse — are as relevant in America during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election as they were during the run-up to the one in 2020. Even as the show continues to do what it always does — recycle and reimagine elements from the broader Fargo universe — there’s a renewed urgency to the storytelling that suggests the focus on something closer to the present has given the series a shot in the arm, and quite possibly a few other body parts. (Yes, Fargo continues to be violent and unsettling in stretches, sometimes audaciously so: a set piece in episode four that takes place on Halloween night manages to braid imagery from A Nightmare Before Christmas with the sound of Tiny Tim singing “I Got You, Babe†in a way that’s simultaneously creepy and elegant.)
The first scene of the season, which premieres its first two episodes tonight on FX and tomorrow on Hulu, zooms right in on the dichotomy that has always defined Fargo: the matter-of-fact decency of the folks in flyover country versus the dark, weird shit that some of these same people get up to when they’re not exchanging pleasantries over a cup of joe. Hawley, who wrote and directed the first two episodes, kicks things off with a title card that lists the definition of “Minnesota Nice†— “an aggressively pleasant demeanor, often forced, in which a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get†— then immediately cuts to a massive brawl at a middle-school fall festival planning meeting in Scandia, a suburb of the Twin Cities. The implication: Everyone in this town, and maybe the whole country, has been pushed so far that they can’t even pretend to be nice anymore.
“What’s the world coming to is all I’m saying,†remarks Deputy Indira Olmstead (Never Have I Ever’s Richa Moorjani) as she takes a local housewife, Dorothy Lyon, to the station to be arrested after Dot impulsively tases an officer during that middle-school melee. “Neighbor against neighbor.â€
Dot, a petite, polite stay-at-home mom played by Juno Temple, seems, on the surface, about as threatening as a 12-year-old Swiftie handing out friendship bracelets. But as the first episode reveals, she has secrets that she hasn’t shared with anyone, not even her tween daughter, Scotty (Sienna King), nor her husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), a kind but milquetoast car salesman with a trust fund he hasn’t tapped. Those secrets lead to two masked guys showing up at the Lyon home in the middle of a Tuesday, intent on kidnapping Dot for reasons Fargo takes its time to fully explain. But the intruders don’t realize this woman is as skilled at fighting and sliding out of thorny situations as a well-trained ninja. After a failed attempt to nab her, one of those bad guys, Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) — a massive tree of a human whose existence seems primordial in the same way that Anton Chigurh’s does in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men — describes Dot as a tiger. She’s a gentle woman until she’s threatened, and when a threat arises, the jaws and the claws come out. We don’t know right away exactly why she’s like this. But we do learn that, as is so often the case when a woman feels endangered, a man is responsible.
Turns out this one is a real piece of work. He’s a corrupt sheriff in North Dakota named Roy Tillman, who was previously married to Dot and tells a pair of FBI agents that his constituents love him because “I say what I want and I do as I please and I know the difference between right and wrong,†all of which he says after sitting buck naked in an outdoor bathtub, his genitalia and a pair of pierced nipples both fully visible. When Roy does wear clothes, he looks like he just wandered out of a Taylor Sheridan series and is really pissed that he can’t figure out how to get back. He is a libertarian who wants the government to stay out of everyone’s business, a misogynist who believes that a wife is the property of her husband, and a father with a fail-son on the force named Gator (Joe Keery) who hangs “Don’t Tread on Me†flags on his walls. He’s also played by Jon Hamm, who drops all the charm he once wore so easily as Don Draper and becomes nothing but sharp edges.
Roy can be frightening, but the most intimidating part of being around him is the palpable sense that, at any moment, he can make things even scarier than they already are. That’s the prevailing mood in season five of Fargo — that things are already bad and about to get worse — and it matches the vibe of America in late October 2019, something the series evokes with a relatively light touch. Images on TVs in the background serve as reminders that the first impeachment of Donald Trump is gaining traction. (Roy’s wife complains at one point that the Democrats are going after “that great man.â€) An undercurrent of resentment toward women bubbles beneath the surface, too, and not just when Roy, Gator, and other characters in their orbit are onscreen. Indira’s absolutely useless husband Lars (Lukas Gage), a dude who spends his days working on his golf game instead of actually working, bemoans the fact that his spouse — the one with an actual job — is not supportive enough. “I want a wife who takes care of my… man needs,†he says with a straight face, even though he knows full well that he has incurred huge debts the couple cannot afford.
Fargo the series, as well as the film, has always been populated with formidable women — law enforcers like Indira, Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson and Allison Tolman’s Molly Solverson from season one, or ruthless bosses along the lines of Jean Smart’s Floyd Gerhardt and another significant character who enters the picture in season five, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the savvy and extremely wealthy mother of Wayne. But these characters haven’t confronted sexism and misogyny as directly as they do in these new episodes. (Note: This also is the first season of Fargo set in the post–Me Too era.) As firm and fascinating as its women often are, Fargo has always felt most interested in exploring masculinity, so it feels significant that Hawley, via his female characters, is so pointedly blasting bullets into the concept of modern manhood.
This is what this season of Fargo does so well and so smartly: It takes archetypes and themes that are familiar from the film and previous seasons of the anthology, then does things with them that we don’t quite expect. It jars itself, and us, out of complacency. By placing its series of unfortunate events so close to the present, Fargo allows us to recall how fraught things felt just four years ago and how blissfully unaware we were of what would soon hit us. Dorothy’s story, about a woman fearful of her past as well as what might be coming for her in the immediate future, is unmistakably a Fargo story. But it artfully captures something new within that story: the palpable tension in a contemporary America where men with guns, badges, and cowboy hats think they make the rules, leaving smart, savvy women with no choice but to prove them wrong.