Fargo: Just like last year, only different

A new formula for TV drama: the ‘anthology series’ with a constantly changing cast. True Detective and Fargo get it right.

Drama that won’t look back

Fargo made an outstanding debut as a television show last year. The dark yet comedic cable drama racked up glowing reviews, earned Emmy nods for all four core cast members and won top awards as a series. Yet when the show begins its second season this month, it essentially is starting over from scratch with a whole new setting, storyline and cast.

Adapted from Joel and Ethan Coen’s snow-encrusted crime film of the same title from 1996, Fargo stands out as an example of TV’s newest template for drama: stories contained in a single season of 10 or so episodes, populated with characters who won’t be seen again after the finale.

Fargo and shows like it are borrowing an approach from old programs such as The Twilight Zone, which offered an anthology of short stories, often unrelated, instead of a single continuous narrative. Another returning series, American Horror Story , was the first to update this approach.

The format’s broader promise paid off last year with the arrival of True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as soul-searching cops, and Fargo, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman as foes in an almost biblical tale of good versus evil. Then the movie stars who propelled these shows moved on after their story arcs ended.

Noah Hawley, who wrote and produced the Fargo series — the second season screens on October 21 in Australia on SBS — compares each season to “10-hour movies” with the same cinematic DNA. He says that from year to year, “you’re looking to duplicate a feeling more than a plot point. That’s not the way a (traditional) television series evolves, where you try launching something that’s going to run forever.”

The rise of the anthology series reflects many of the changes transforming the TV world. Shows with close-ended seasons give producers a way to recruit movie stars who want in on a hot medium but are unwilling to lock themselves into the multi-year contract of a traditional series.

Viewers, deluged with programming options and more apt to watch on their own schedule, can jump aboard an anthology series without having to do homework on previous seasons. Networks, desperate to stand out, use terms such as “limited series” and “event ­series” to trumpet their one-off star vehicles — which can get ­re­labelled as anthologies if their ­impact merits a second round.

ABC landed 10 Emmy nominations earlier this year for American Crime, created by 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley. The show’s cachet balanced out against its relatively low ratings; ABC ordered a second season of American Crime, with a new case at its centre and entirely new roles for its returning stars, including Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton and Regina King, who won a supporting-actress Emmy for her work on the first season.

Now the anthology model is entering a crucial new chapter as TV networks and audiences alike discover the pros and cons of shows that essentially start over with each new season.

True Detective went from a poster child for TV’s golden age to a pariah among critics of its second instalment this year.

It traded its setting in the US south for southern California and introduced troubled characters played by Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, ­Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch, along with a convoluted mystery that befuddled many viewers.

On the plus side, a third cycle of True Detective would give creator Nic Pizzolatto a blank slate. HBO hasn’t yet confirmed a third ­season.

When Fargo made its debut on the small screen last year, it faced the challenge of getting viewers to even understand what it was: a sort-of sequel to the Coen brothers’ film, but one that didn’t ­feature any of their original characters or involve their creative input. (The filmmakers gave the series their blessing and share in profits as executive producers, but the ­studio MGM controls the rights to Fargo.)

Hawley is a novelist whose work in TV brought him varying degrees of frustration and success before he got hired to adapt Fargo. He conjured up a world that felt like the Coens’, with similar camera work, tidbits of weirdness and composer Jeff Russo’s variations on the film’s haunting musical score. Yet his version thrived on its own terms, thanks to vivid characters such as Lorne Malvo, Thornton’s journeyman killer, who delights in manipulating everyone he meets.

After winning Emmy and Golden Globe awards last year for best miniseries, the show is returning after a 1½-year gap with certain elements intact. The exaggerated midwest mannerisms (“Ookay then”) remain, as does the framework of a killing in episode one that entangles decent folks with violent criminals. Though the plot is fictional, each episode begins with a message to viewers: “This is a true story.”

One family carries over. In season one, set in 2006, the character Lou Solverson (played by Keith Carradine) was a widower with a limp who worried about the safety of his police-officer daughter ­(Allison Tolman) and made references to a massacre he witnessed in 1979. In season two, set in that year, Solverson is played as a younger man by Patrick Wilson. His daughter Molly is six years old, and his wife is still alive. A state trooper and Vietnam war vet, Solverson is the first to recognise the cross-currents of danger ­converging in his town.

Virtually every other aspect of the plot has changed. The new time period involves repercussions from the Vietnam war, the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and the spread of feminism.

Instead of one man trapped in a festering lie, as portrayed by Freeman in the show’s first series and by William H. Macy in the original movie, in season two it’s a married couple — played by Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons — who stumble into a crime ­cover-up together. The rest of the cast is new, too. Jean Smart is the matriarch of a Fargo crime family that has to fend off a takeover by a more corporate crime organisation from Kansas City. The syndicate’s envoy is played by Brad Garrett, who says of Smart’s character, Floyd Gerhardt, “She’s tough. But, you know, a girl.”

Hawley says: “I was just increasing the level of difficulty. Now there’s a much larger cast, but you still have to feel just as ­involved and attached to all of them.”

For the producers, there are disadvantages to rebooting the show. “There’s not a single set from season one that is used in season two,” says John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks and FX Productions. On the other hand, Landgraf notes that producers didn’t face the escalating costs involved with retaining cast members for multiple seasons.

The first time around, Hawley worked with four writers initially to map out the entire season’s plot developments before writing all the scripts himself. This time, he reconvened the same team but also had them contribute to script writing.

However, the number of stars is bigger, and it costs more to re-create 1979, which required licensing songs from the era for the soundtrack. Executive producer Warren Littlefield adds, “Every belt, jacket and pair of shoes is from the ­period, along with every car and toaster.”

Given the reverence for the movie Fargo, the title almost worked against the TV series in its first season. “If it wasn’t as good as it was, we would have been a laughing-stock,” Landgraf says. In year two, that name recognition helps the show’s prospects (as does its track record of awards and critical acclaim). However, it’s possible the recipe — oddball humour mixed with grisly violence in a world where pivotal murders go down at the Waffle Hut — could get stale.

In season two, Hawley and his team have found ways to define their own style, such as the introduction of split-screen sequences and the decision to make the social crises of the late 70s “more than just a backdrop”, he says.

That’s not to say there aren’t ­direct references to the Coen brothers’ work. For instance, a meat grinder fulfils a similar function to the woodchipper that pulverised Steve Buscemi’s character in the film.

Hawley declines to say whether he has woven threads into season two that could lead to a follow-up story.

Littlefield, however, foresees an indefinite number of chapters for the show, depending on how many Hawley can create for it: “Imagine that there’s a great big book called True Crimes of the Midwest, and therein could lie any season of Fargo.”

The Wall Street Journal