Fargo

The second season of Fargo is just as fantastic as the first. And viewers who didn't catch the first season can easily slide into the second. Some nuances will be lost, but those are minor compared to how good this series is.... Hawley and his writers' greatest strength is incredible control of tone and atmosphere.

The new season offers even more [with casting], with delicious results.... An entertaining season of this sublime series.

Fargo goes where HBO's "True Detective" didn't--to a second story and cast of characters as compelling as its first.

Through the first four episodes, Fargo remains a terrific thriller laced with black humor.... Welcome back, Fargo, which in its early going proves itself the best TV series fall 2015 has to offer.

It might be even better--yes, even better, if exceeding perfection is possible--than the first.

Writer and executive producer Noah Hawley upped the game with a sharp, well-developed story involving multiple moving parts. It’s smart, thought out and full of watchable characters with convincing enough motives to create the perfect amount of viewer sympathy. The end result isn’t just a “Fargo” 2.0 (or 3.0 depending on your love of film), but an evolved story that takes television to a whole new level.

This Fargo has a different idea of evil, based on something just as insidious as Malvo: The grinding amorality of capitalism, which demands more profit no matter what the human cost. In the new Fargo, this is placed in a context that is frequently witty, and balanced with scenes of great family love. The large cast is superb.

It’s atypical in the television industry for a show born of a larger creative trend to surpass the trend’s flashpoint, but with the new season, Fargo puts itself head and shoulders above its anthology peers. Bigger isn’t necessarily better, but can it be, when done thoughtfully? You betcha.

The new season of Fargo shows TV-making at its most impressive, with every single aspect--the writing, the acting, the directing, the cinematography, the music, the set design--spot on and in sync.

Every performer here brings his or her A-game, and the little nods to the day--such as the chatter about a seminar that will help “actualize” the attendees or the salesman who believes that the electric typewriter represents an unparalleled technological revolution--are both striking and sad.... Fargo is terrific.

In sum, Fargo is smart, thrilling, imaginative television, in addition to being (as I would probably have described it in 1979) wicked funny. If there’s a better show this season--or possibly this year--I’ll be happily surprised.

Stitched into every word, every gesture, is an implicit recognition of that brutal Fargo credo: People can be cruel, stupid, mean and unintentionally funny, even the nice ones. Another winner.

Despite its endlessly flat landscape, FX's Fargo is elevated by the most spellbinding direction of any drama currently on TV. Season 2 achieves new heights, thanks to writer-director Noah Hawley. The music is exaggeratedly dramatic, and the split-screen device is a throwback to early TV and film's bold experimentation.

Like the best TV, Fargo doesn’t feel like TV.... Fargo is the best show currently on television. It’s arguably a modern television masterpiece.

Through scene after scene, Fargo crackles with mordant wit and sustained tension. And yet, wisely, Hawley always finds a way to remind us of what's at risk.... The cast is spectacular, with nary a false note.

Season two is one of the better TV dramas of an already excellent year, and that series creator Noah Hawley, his filmmaking team, and his cast have perfected what was already a promising spinoff of the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic.

Fargo casts a mesmerizing spell of suspenseful whimsy in its second year. [12-25 Oct 2015, p.16]

This is confident, clever, fantastic television. It doesn’t have a trio of characters as instantly vibrant as the three at the core of season one, and it doesn’t have a premiere episode that will make jaws drop like last time around, but the first four episodes develop into something remarkable of their own, again thematically referencing back to the last trip to the snowy North, but in its own, mesmerizing way.

The first four episodes sent for review give every indication that this all-new story with mostly new characters will reach if not surpass FX’s first time around with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Keith Carradine, etc.

In this incarnation of Fargo, evil isn't just expressed haphazardly or ineptly through accident or spontaneous acts of violence.

The Emmy-winning first season of Fargo, the limited series that was inspired by the Coen brothers film of the same name was a triumph on multiple levels as one of the most creative and evocative works on TV in 2014. The second season proves that was no fluke.... It's all here--writing, acting, directing, music--combining to make a very riveting and entertaining dark comedy spectacle.

The second season may be even better than the first.... Here's an anthology miniseries follow-up that recaptures all that worked well in the original, even as it's forging its own identity.

The most important thing about what's before us is that Fargo remains a risk-taker. Between Ronald Reagan and moments lifted straight out of "The X-Files," it's a show that is having fun, while also being real about the costs of having fun, while living outside the law.

The second season of FX’s Emmy-winning limited series has a new cast and mystery, and it promises to be even more fun and weirder than the first.

Whatever feels discordant is eventually lost in the grace of the performances, the elegance of the production and the liberally distributed suspense.

It’s involving--and just the series to keep your mind off the snow that's lurking. Fargo's still a prime TV destination.

The only complaint one could muster about Fargo this time is that it spreads itself on too thickly in the first two episodes. In moments that count, the show can seem more interested in style than substance. Season 2 also introduces so many characters (played by equally strong actors, including Ted Danson as Trooper Solverson’s father-in-law, Hank; Cristin Milioti as Solverson’s wife, Betsy; and Nick Offerman as Karl, Luverne’s most conspiracy-minded lawyer--to name a few) and so many fascinating threads at once that it threatens to collapse under its own weight. The intricacies do begin to cohere by Episode 4.

FX’s frost-covered drama appears to have equaled its splendid predecessor, capturing the same off-kilter tone while actually enhancing the comedy quotient. If the first series deftly approximated the spirit of its movie namesake, this one works in a cheeky Quentin Tarantino vibe, with results as refreshing and bracing as the region’s abundant snow.

As always, this is a scattered story with multiple moving parts.... Fargo revels in presenting ordinary folk with extraordinary problems, in stripping away their everyday guises and peering long and hard at their dark potential. That it can do this through adaptations of true stories makes it all the more jaw-dropping.

The season gains more complexity and considerable power as it gains even more characters whose expressions of identity flick at other tenured and enduring American problems.

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.