The first three seasons of FX’s Fargo each followed the spirit of the 1996 Coen brothers film that inspired the series, although they featured new characters and storylines. The stories took place in and around the Minnesota and North Dakota settings of the movie, often in the dead of winter, and they generally featured one or more bumbling everyday folks who found themselves in over their heads with unsavory characters, along with one or more upstanding law enforcement agents trying to restore order and do the right thing.
By the show’s third season in 2017, though, the formula had worn a little thin, even though creator Noah Hawley could still come up with entertainingly odd characters and increasingly convoluted ways to put them in danger. Returning nearly three years later, Fargo’s fourth season goes in a new direction, moving the setting south to Kansas City, Missouri, and the time period to 1950. Plus, Fargo Season 4 structures the story around a war between two criminal organizations rather than a handful of individuals caught up in events beyond their control. There are multiple law enforcement characters, but almost none of these characters is trying to restore order or do the right thing.
Without the brightness of the characters played by Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Patrick Wilson, Ted Danson and Carrie Coon in past seasons, Fargo Season 4 is a bit tough to get into, but it retains the signature dark humor that Hawley adapted from the Coens, along with the creator's commitment to formal experimentation. The Coens' movie that seems the most influential on this season is 1990’s Miller’s Crossing, a brutally funny story about a rivalry between Irish and Italian gangs during Prohibition. Here, the main rivalry is between the established operation led by the Italian Fadda family and the upstart operation run by the African-American Cannon family.
In the first episode, Hawley traces the changing ethnic dynamics of organized crime in Kansas City, starting with the Jewish mob in 1900, which was eventually supplanted by the Irish mob, which was in turn supplanted by the Italians. Hawley positions the looming war between the Faddas and the Cannons as part of the cycle of history, with the implication that the entrenched Italians will inevitably be displaced. But the historical treatment of Blacks in America changes that dynamic, since the Cannons aren’t immigrants in the same way that the previous crime families were. Like recent prestige dramas Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, this season of Fargo uses a genre story to examine the history of race in the U.S., although it’s not nearly as thematically dense.
In a clever bit of counterintuitive casting, the heads of the two crime families are played by Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman, two actors not known for their intense dramatic roles. Loy Cannon (Rock) is the veteran patriarch of his organization, while Josto Fadda (Schwartzman) takes over when his respected father dies unexpectedly. Before that, the two families engage in a tradition for the local crime organizations, swapping the leaders’ young sons so that each family has something precious to lose if they move on the other.
Caught in the middle of this turf war are the Smutnys, an interracial family who run a local funeral home and are in debt to the Cannons. Bright teenager Ethelrida Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield) is the closest this season has to a genuine hero, and she’s curious about what her parents Thurman (Andrew Bird) and Dibrell (Anji White) have gotten the family into. This season has multiple characters who could fill the unhinged psychopath role played by Billy Bob Thornton, Bokeem Woodbine and David Thewlis in previous seasons, starting with deceptively sweet-sounding nurse Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), who’s fond of mercy-killing her patients and takes special interest in both Ethelrida and Josto.
Buckley is fantastic in a spin on the original movie’s “Minnesota nice,” as the only character with a connection to that region, and Oraetta isn’t just a copy of the previous seasons’ agents of chaos. Less effective is Salvatore Esposito as Josto’s volatile brother Gaetano, who travels from Italy following their father’s death, and attempts to take over the Fadda operation with his more brutal, violent approach, in contrast to Josto’s diplomacy. Gaetano is more of a one-dimensional villain, the kind of criminal who kills underlings for petty grievances and spends a lot of time menacingly lurking in corners. Josto, who is often flustered and underestimated, is a far more interesting character, and his struggle to live up to the image of a crime boss is a new angle on a familiar story.
Schwartzman demonstrates more range in his against-type casting than Rock, who simply dials down his lively comedic persona as Loy, making the character often fade into the background of his own story. Glynn Turman, who plays Loy’s ridiculously named right-hand man Doctor Senator, makes for a far more convincing crime boss, and Turman’s charismatic performance makes Rock look less impressive by comparison. Still, the sprawling set of characters gives the story an appropriate epic scope, which is a new approach for the series, and makes this season feel fresh, even if it’s operating in a well-established genre.
Hawley still has a penchant for showiness that can sometimes be distracting, and he can mistake quirky character names for actual character building (“What kind of cockeyed names are those?” a local cop complains after being told about a pair of prison escapees). By the season’s halfway point, there are so many characters and plot threads running that the show gets a little unwieldy, but the way that Fargo established itself as its own entity separate from the movie was thanks to Hawley’s ambition. Better for him to be reaching for something new than just falling back on what worked in the past.
Starring Chris Rock, Jason Schwartzman, Jessie Buckley, Salvatore Esposito, Gaetano Bruno, Ben Whishaw, Andrew Bird, Anji White, E’myri Crutchfield, Timothy Olyphant and Jack Huston, the fourth season of Fargo premieres Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on FX.