Fargo

Too early to call, but Season 4 may be Fargo’s best run yet given its larger scope and more ambitious message. It helps that Fargo never preaches to its audience; instead, it embraces its strengths and trusts viewers to connect the dots on their own.

There are so very many good and great things to point to — characters whose evil is a thing of warped beauty, plots that balance thrillingly on contingency and bad timing, dialogue whose comedy is cloaked in murderous intention and gluttony, resonant cinematography that speaks of a grimly Disunited States — I don’t know which one to start with. Series creator Noah Hawley has come up with yet another ambitious, dazzling, and entertaining season of his Coen brothers-based anthology series.

Even with the lofty stories it’s woven throughout the years there’s nothing quite as ambitious, intense, or grand as Fargo Season 4. Whether or not that’s a good thing will depend on what draws you to Fargo in the first place.

“Fargo” feels utterly of its time and place. The dialogue is stylized and clever. ... Every episode contains stunning, elaborately choreographed scenes worthy of a major feature film. This is one of the best-looking series of the year, featuring some of the strongest performances of the year from more than a dozen of our finest actors.

There are some ambitious ideas at play here and the technical elements of “Fargo” are strong throughout, but what really starts to elevate Season 4 around that third episode is the ensemble.

Season 4 may not go down as the best year of “Fargo.” The structure lurches a bit, episode to episode, and the cast can’t collectively hit the highs of prior seasons’ players. (In part because they’re not asked to, given the dour tone.) But Hawley’s choice to evolve beyond his established structure is as necessary as it is invigorating.

Hawley is a creator who loves images, ideas, and words, and not a single episode watched for review (FX provided the first nine) lacks for an unforgettable camera shot, a haunting character choice, or a line of dialogue so weird and wonderful it could only be Fargo. And in a year when pretty much everything feels coated with a layer of tarnish, perhaps it’s right that Year 4 is a season where heroes feel very hard to find.

Four seasons in and Fargo is still as strong as ever, a sprawling gangland feud delivered with bravura filmmaking. It’s a lot to get your head round but, skilfully played by a pitch-perfect cast, it’s well worth the effort.

FX's Fargo returns after an absence of three years, with no discernible diminution of bloodlust, contempt for its fellow man, or general weirdness.

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.

Hawley and company are in no hurry to help us sort through [the characters and conflicts], but there is a strong design and structure being formed here, and patience is rewarded. ... The road is long, but worth traveling.

Fargo is significantly better than the disappointing third season, though probably not as good as the near-perfect second season.

Even as tension builds, it’s a treat to hear pungent dialogue, revel in artful cinematography and evocative music, and get caught up in a story that’s a bit too sprawling, but makes us wonder what happens next.

Like America itself, Fargo is a dizzying, delightful swirl of influences. And this move away from the series’ familiar Minnesota home turf is mostly a rollicking success. After all, there’s plenty of snow — and blood — to be found in a Kansas City winter, too.

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.

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.”

Although smart and beautiful, there is something left wanting in the new episodes – an inciting murder that grabs you in the first episode – perhaps because the previous seasons of "Fargo" are just that breathtaking.

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.

Because it antes in so many pots, this “Fargo” is like a thick novel – frequently unwieldy. Schwartzman and Buckley get lost (just when you need them the most); Timothy Olyphant and Jack Huston show up as lawmen when you’re not quite ready for them.

It unfolds at such a languid, almost hypnotic pace as to blunt its impact, getting distracted by an abundance of oddball characters that don't overtly do much to advance the central plot.

Fargo has lost its footing in Season 4, succumbing to stylization and caricature and gratuitous over-plotting, and effectively wasting a tremendous cast. We’re left with a weak story and a few banal monologues about race, money, and Life In America.

Props for a diverse cast and first-rate performances, but "4" does sprawl, occasionally sag.

In general though, the opening was weighed down with scene setting and favoured style over substance.

Given that Fargo has always stood out, it is strange that it seems to be settling for blending in.

Fargo has always been more a triumph of style than substance, but here, the discrepancy is broader than ever.

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.

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.

The new "Fargo" isn’t terrible — it’s loaded with talent, the story rolls along, there’s lots of nice dialogue. But it’s just not near as good or unique as the previous three seasons. Great shows breed great expectations.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.