‘Fargo’ Season 2 Review: FX Drama Avoids the ‘True Detective’ Trap

“It is a completely new story”. We’re humbled by how hard that can be. With the new season being set in the ’70s, does that feeling of a sort of national unrest that was present then feed into the new season? “Huge economic recession. Gas lines”. Jimmy Carter is trying to grapple with post-Vietnam America. Any time, he was there for us. He was a dwarf star implosive enough to suggest that mayhem and scorched-earth mischief were a mandate ordained by a few greater power, one we could only hope was fate rather than any god.

Totally a normal thing to do. A quick Google search could’ve picked up on that little language quirk on the first page of search results, I’m just saying. It can be wrapped pretty tight. Dodd says he’ll handle it, and patriarch Otto (Michael Hogan) says he’ll grind their bones to make his… Is this who she’s meant to be?

You know, as you do. And, then, boom: It kind of snaps.

Unfortunately her life collides with Rye Gerhardt [Culkin], and she realizes if she owns up to it, she’ll never get to define her own life. But unlike the tightly-wound tension and quirky comedic release of the Coens’ film and Season 1, the second installment of Hawley’s series doesn’t always hit the mark. I don’t want to call her a little delusional, but she has such a zeroed-in path of what she wants to do and what she wants to be, and then there is this other part that’s stopping her. What was the household that she grew up in? “It is a much bigger story, kind of an American epic”. When I started to get into Episodes Three and Four I started to go, “OK, I see where he’s going”. Now you see her world, and the influences on her life, and her mom.

While preparing for the second season of his television-adaptation homage Fargo, show-runner Noah Hawley became interested in the work of David Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose recent three-part series placed moral injury as the “signature wound” of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet what it echoes, of where we’re headed, there was never a balk or a flinch from FX.

The premiere also does a great job of introducing a wide array of characters and the cast this season is incredible. Solverson is dealing with an ill wife and young daughter at home. I just had that image of those two men in the emergency room, and one was a civilized man and the other was the opposite. I am telling you, that is an impossible thing to do. Yet as much as Fargo is a praiseworthy, original series of high cinematic caliber, from its stunning cinematography to sharp direction, the ultra-slow-boiling plot may challenge viewers’ patience. I think so much of that is done with the script, but I relish that. But all the thematic work and character – I didn’t know any of the story. We do care how well it does initially on our network, but we’re your partners. And that’s what we’ll consider success.

“If it was nothing but a bunch of dudes and Jean Smart’s character, I’d still be like there’s nothing else like this on television”, Milioti said, expanding her answer to encompass all the women of Fargo. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Continue to Page 2 as Hawley discusses more about Fargo: Season 2, including casting Bruce Campbell as Ronald Reagan.

Peggy says when she first hit Rye she thought he was dead, so she drove home with him sticking out of the windshield. The result of that achievement?

It’s a premise that film-maker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen first harnessed for the 1996 film Fargo, a black comedy in which a desperate vehicle salesman falls into a doomed sequence of events stemming from a botched kidnapping. In the previous two versions of Fargo this was taken to Old Testament lengths: a primordial struggle between good and evil. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Dunst thrive in the decade of disco. If he felt bone-breaking pressure to serialize a Coen Brothers film, imagine the pressure going into its wildly anticipated sophomore year. Does Season 2 have that same aim?

Show Summary: The all new “true crime” case in Fargo’s latest chapter takes you back to 1979 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Luverne, Minnesota. “I have not personally seen any writing for female roles like this”. This year we have a different thing, but there’s still something.

How early on in the show’s conception was it envisioned as an anthology series? I love playing really tiny, small beats where I can talk to the director and be like, “Are you in there?” I think it varies. How’d she get the nozzle right on the first try? “They’re not cool at all”.

The all-new “true crime” case of season 2 is about the war brewing between a local crime gang and a major mob syndicate, both of whom are seeking control of the illegal activity in and around Fargo.

This video includes images from Getty Images.