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Positive:
155
Mixed:
19
Negative:
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Critic Reviews
The TelegraphNov 22, 2023
Nov 21, 2023
Season 5 Review:
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.
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Nov 21, 2023
Season 5 Review:
Temple, best known here for “Ted Lasso,” is terrific. .... Three-fifths of the way in, the story feels comparatively conventional, notwithstanding that medieval flashback. But with four hours left to go — two whole “Fargo” movies — there are certainly surprises ahead, twists around corners hidden behind corners. Things will probably get crazy, and I’m eager to see it.
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Nov 15, 2023
Season 5 Review:
Promises to be an entertaining, stylishly filmed one. It’s not going to be peak “Fargo,” at least based on the four (of 10) episodes made available for review, but it features a few dynamic performances, a nicely focused story line, some compelling action, and a turn by Jennifer Jason Leigh that is so excessive you’ll wonder if her acting tutor is Nicolas Cage.
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Oct 1, 2020
Season 4 Review:
By throwing caution to the frostbiting wind, rather than trudging over former glories, Hawley and co. give TV’s great snow swept saga quirkier characters that cover greater thematic ground. Is it a departure? And is that what makes it great? On both counts: oh yeaaah, you betcha.
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Sep 14, 2020
Sep 14, 2020
Season 4 Review:
It's a period drama featuring two dozen (or more) main and guest characters. Yet even with those moments in which Fargo loses track of who was supposed to be the story's heart or which narrative threads have the most urgency, when the show works — when its vision is realized entirely — very little on TV can compete.
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UPROXXApr 13, 2017
Season 3 Review:
There’s a palpable joy throughout, not only in the performances by actors like Thewlis and Winstead who play the more outgoing roles, but in the way that Hawley and his collaborators assemble the pieces. ... If the new season turns out to be a slightly diminished version of what came before, that’s still a pretty good place to be.
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Oct 12, 2015
Season 2 Review:
The story is muddier and more complex than last season’s, full of halfway nice and semi-awful people rather than the purely good and bad. Every episode starts with a ’70s jam and a jaunty split screen. The Midwestern accents are inconsistent and strange, but that only makes them funnier.
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Apr 15, 2014
Season 1 Review:
At times, however, Hawley goes a little too heavy on the quirk, and Thornton, who last regularly appeared on TV in the John Ritter political comedy “Hearts Afire” in the early 1990s, overly indulges in that smirk. Bits between mob enforcers Mr. Numbers (Adam Goldberg) and Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard) also wear out their welcome. The overall quality of TV's Fargo is high.
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Apr 15, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The pilot can be alienating, and not in a good way. It's often too schematic, too obvious.... The next three episodes get incrementally weirder, stronger, and more original, to the point that you forget to measure this Fargo against its namesake, or against any of the Coens' masterworks, and simply enjoy the odd, sour, frightening, occasionally splendid thing in front of you.
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The Daily BeastNov 20, 2023
ColliderNov 9, 2023
Sep 23, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Fargo occasionally strains under the weight of what it’s attempting to accomplish: a lively examination of the history of different groups of Western European immigrants who have gradually been granted whiteness, and the many Black Americans, whose ancestors were brought here by force (and greed), but are now, as Doctor Senator puts it, a “part of this land, like the wind and the dirt.”
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Apr 18, 2017
Season 3 Review:
The show’s reputation continues to attract a variety of actors you wouldn’t necessarily put in a room together. Fortunately, McGregor underplays the dual role, avoiding caricature and subtly altering his Minnesota accent to suggest Ray and Emmit have had two completely different lives.
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Apr 18, 2017
Season 3 Review:
The season’s second episode signals that Hawley will probably make great use of the “Fargo” template. But three seasons in, it has to be more of a challenge to take similar characters, situations and sensibilities, all of which are narrowly defined, and make them feel completely fresh. For now, though, we’ll give Fargo the benefit of a very slight doubt.
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Sep 23, 2015
Season 2 Review:
Hawley’s writing is vivid, sardonic, smart, and brilliantly deadpan, in keeping with the tone of the original “Fargo” movie. His characterizations are deft, nicely nuanced and compelling, offering more than enough for the actors to work with. Danson feels a little out of place, but he may grow into his role. Culkin, Garrett, Smart, Plemons, Dunst and Donovan are outstanding.
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Apr 11, 2014
Season 1 Review:
At times, there are actual punch lines in the script and the show veers into "writerly" territory.... But make no mistake: You should overlook the shortcomings and enjoy the series on its own otherwise considerable merits, chief among them, of course, Billy Bob Thornton.
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Nov 22, 2023
Season 5 Review:
Later surprise-laden and richly complex scenes handily salvage Fargo’s fifth season after a ham-fisted start. That, and consistently remarkable performances at even the most shoddily written early moments, along with breathtaking action and bleak humor, show Hawley is still a TV visionary well suited to build on the Coen Brothers’ Fargo 1996 film legacy–even if he takes commendable big swings that occasionally miss.
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Sep 25, 2020
Season 4 Review:
I had no trouble watching nine hours of the new series at a sitting, except for the sitting. ... Because criminals dominate the action, the story seems not so much morally complex as unfocused, and because there are so many storylines competing for air, including one involving Jessie Buckley as a nurse with bad habits (and a Minnesota accent to honor the franchise), the show robs some promising characters of screen time.
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Apr 18, 2017
Season 3 Review:
Once we’re aware that’s coming, we can’t help but to expect it to happen. That puts the onus on Hawley and his writers to cook up an act so unexpected that it jolts us nevertheless. Whether initial crime of Season 3 fulfills that promise is debatable. The auxiliary circumstances and characters surrounding it, however, don’t initially hold enough tension to makes us salivate with anxiety for where this story will go next.
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Apr 14, 2017
Season 3 Review:
It’s a somewhat slower build--and there’s a seemingly non-sequitur prologue to wade through at the start--but eventually this Fargo premiere suggests reason for excitement for the new season. But then episode two comes along and also fails to ignite the addictive interest of past installments, so this year’s Fargo will require a wait-and-see approach.
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Apr 13, 2017
Season 3 Review:
In the early going, the third season of Fargo, which is set in 2010, offers a sprinkling of skillful characterization, dialogue, and production design without providing enough psychologically compelling components to balance out the largely dry and even perfunctory aspects of the drama. The elements viewers have come to expect are accounted for, as if by checklist.
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Apr 15, 2014
Season 1 Review:
The singular quality of the Coen Brothers' Fargo was the breathtaking, almost palpable tone it created by threading violence and wit through a staggeringly vapid Midwestern milieu. Fargo the series cannot recapture that fission, but it is enjoyable, funny, and, something TV rarely is, weird.
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Nov 21, 2023
Season 5 Review:
The first few episodes are a riveting cat-and-mouse game with the potential for a role reversal heavily foreshadowed. .... But the momentum starts to flag as Hawley works to sustain drum-tight tension for several hours. .... The more “Fargo” plays up Roy and Dot as archetypes of a controlling man and his victim, the less interesting they are.
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Nov 21, 2023
Season 5 Review:
To the extent the latest version delivers a modest kick from its trademark mix of deadpan humor and explosive violence, is it possible to enjoy this season (six of the 10 were made available) strictly on its terms? You betcha. Thus far, though, this feels like a case of an established formula gradually yielding diminishing returns.
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Sep 28, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Fargo still creates an absorbing, cinematic viewing experience, with painterly framing, pointedly deployed split-screen and arcane yet evocative needle drops. ... With such a crowded plot, it’s no wonder the show can’t maintain a consistent tone. ... Like this nation, the new season is a beautiful and ugly, inspiring and infuriating, a tragic and sometimes darkly hilarious mess. As frustrating as it often was to watch, I couldn’t look away.
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Sep 14, 2020
Season 4 Review:
At this point, even after three years between seasons, the Fargo model has gotten a little stale. Season 4 is feeling a bit like diminishing returns. Which is not to say the show is at all bad; it's still fun to watch and exceptionally well-made. It just doesn't feel as vital as it once did.
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Sep 28, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Previous seasons of "Fargo" achieve a balance between quotable dialogue and surprising action. That former features much more heavily than the latter in this season that slow-walks the narrative toward inevitable death and violence. If you have an ear for logorrhea and a hankering for quirk, these new "Fargo" episodes should deliver satisfaction. If that previous sentence made you roll your eyes or curse its writer, save your televisual peregrinating for another title. (To put it more simply, you can let this one pass.)
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Sep 24, 2020
Season 4 Review:
This is a highly professional endeavor, and there’s nothing (too) embarrassing happening here. The show’s self-seriousness leans toward the dull more than the ridiculous, although some ridiculousness would be more fun. It doesn’t help that Rock, who has described this as the best part he’s “ever, ever, ever” had, is in such single-mindedly dramatic mode that he does not bring any looseness or lightness to his role
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Sep 24, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Fargo is full of riches—decadent set pieces and fascinating visual choices—but they ornament a sparse narrative. ... Fargo isn’t bad. It tries to do so many things, and it kind of succeeds at a lot of them. But it serves too many masters to transcend the sum of its parts.
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Sep 24, 2020
Season 4 Review:
It’s a more ordinary show, a more mundanely plotted and “watchable” show (through the nine episodes available for review), with less of the strangeness and arch surrealism that didn’t always work but generally kept you engaged with the stories. Its oddities felt original in earlier seasons; here, they tend toward caricature. And cliché.
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RogerEbert.comSep 23, 2020
Season 4 Review:
This latest “Fargo” installment suffers from too much muchness. There are isolated scenes of excellent melodrama, some thoughtfully pointed questions about the decay of the American dream, and a few standout performances. ... But with more characters than backstory, some particularly predictable turns, and a certain simplistic approach to its questions about race, this fourth season of “Fargo” sometimes feels like a tornado: all bluster and destruction, but with hollow emptiness at its core.
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Sep 18, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Outsize characterizations are not new for “Fargo,” but a balance has been lost here, with many characters standing in for the grandest sorts of evil and too few giving us what the series at its best possesses — soulfulness. Rock gets those notes, though, and plays them well. ... Rock’s real human wistfulness, a break in the season’s showy nuttery, feels like a flicker of the show that might have been, and could be still.
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Apr 15, 2014
Season 1 Review:
Hawley’s film noir plot is reasonably Coen-esque in its twists and misunderstandings and character-motivated actions. But it can’t match the extremely particular style of the inimitable and unpredictable Coens, a target Hawley apparently chose for himself and misses by a country mile.
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Nov 22, 2023
Season 5 Review:
It’s much easier to emulate the arch performance style of the Coens’ movies than it is to convey a sense of the character beneath the quirks, and Temple never gives a sense of who Dot is at her core, even when it turns out later in the season that there are many more shoes left to drop. Leigh too seems overdirected, all nasal consonants and power-suit scowls. Hamm strikes a more effective balance. .... Hawley is disinclined or perhaps incapable of replicating their [the Coens'] self-effacing charm.
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Sep 24, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Season four of Fargo isn’t interested in subtext unless it can be turned into text, underlined and boldfaced, with directional arrows. ... Anachronisms sink otherwise serviceable exchanges (the Twitter-certified warning “slow your roll” shows up twice), and lit’ry word-clots fail to translate from page to screen.
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Sep 14, 2020
Season 4 Review:
Earlier iterations of Fargo drew a lot of their power from a wide ensemble of curious people. Here, every introductory quirk is immediately annoying. ... It doesn’t help that, as the two characters with most prominence on their respective sides, Schwartzman and Rock are giving two flavors of bad performance.
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