Summary

With a dynamite cast and a proudly eccentric tone, Fargo Season 5 is a clear return to form for the series.

The simplest thing one can say about Fargo Season 5, which debuts on FX three years after the maligned fourth season inexplicably explored inter-mob race relations in 50s Kansas City, is that it feels like Fargo again.

What does Fargo feel like? Tough to say. It’s more of an intuitive thing than a checklist of requirements, but a show that opens with the same true story disclaimer despite not being a true story, and that has characters with names like Doctor Senator, has a specific vibe. The fifth season’s premiere includes an epigraph defining the term “Minnesota Nice”, a cultural stereotype that suggests Minnesotans are determinedly reserved and courteous regardless of how bad the circumstances around them might be, and a lot of the show lives up to the idea.

The iconic Coen Brothers movie that serves as the inspiration for Noah Hawley’s series was defined by this too, so fake niceties masking a lot of essential weirdness is the point. Fargo Season 5 is weird. It’s also funny and violent and sometimes, just for fun, masquerades as straight-up horror, but it never stops feeling like everything about it is an entertaining put-on for the benefit of an audience who wants precisely what is being delivered.

Fargo Season 5 review and plot summary

Set in the fall of 2019, the latest season of Fargo is the closest to the present-day the series has ever come, and has the fractious politics to match. The premiere opens with the camera pulling back on a slow-motion brawl that has erupted in a school board planning meeting, with the faculty and the local parents trading blows; a community and its institutions openly at odds with itself.

We meet Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) as she tries to spirit her daughter Scotty (Sienna King) out of the fray, nervously tasing both a teacher and a police officer as she exits. She’s arrested by local cop Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) and booked at the station. When her prints are put into the national database, it kick-starts the season’s plot by alerting the villain, her ex-husband, where she’s hiding out.

See, for Dot, “Minnesota Nice” isn’t just an attitude – it’s a cover for a complete reinvention. Dot’s name isn’t really Dot, and she isn’t really from Minnesota, and her thick accent is just for show. She’s married to a mild-mannered man named Wayne (David Rysdahl) and has been cosplaying a suburban housewife for years. But when she’s forced to defend herself or her family, she reveals a darker, MacGyver-meets-Macauley-Culkin side.

Dot, then, is the show’s nominal hero, and every hero needs a good villain. Fargo Season 5 serves up a couple, both intended to speak for a certain political viewpoint that is exaggerated for effect but rooted in reality. The first is Lorraine (Coen alum Jennifer Jason Leigh), Wayne’s wealthy mother, a caricature of socioeconomic elites. She thought Dot’s made-up persona was beneath her family, so goodness knows what she’ll make of who she really is.

The second is Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), the sheriff of a remote North Dakota county who runs the place like his own personal fiefdom, concerned less with the law as written and more with the notion of righting wrongs according to his own moral code, which is several decades out of date. We meet him lecturing a wife-beating husband about how violence against one’s spouse should be reserved only for instruction about how to be a better, more subservient wife.

This is who Dot understandably fled from, and who immediately sends henchmen looking for, including a kilt-wearing eccentric named Ole Munch (Sam Spruell) and his own deputy failson, Gator (Joe Keery), neither of whom are necessarily prepared for Dot’s brand of home and self-defense.

If this sounds a lot like the previous seasons of Fargo, that’s the point. It’s usually in a long-running show’s best interests to reinvent itself from time to time, but it’s also equally desirable for it to return to form after a misstep, and Hawley relishes the opportunity here to essentially play a cover-band take on his previous efforts, buoyed by an extraordinarily good cast doing all the dramatic heavy lifting.

Hamm’s the obvious attention-grabbing name on the bill, but everyone’s great in this, clearly relishing the prospect of playing exaggerated stereotypes that sometimes encompass multiple arch performance styles in the same string of scenes. Temple’s Dot is the only character who is very explicitly leading a double life, but almost everyone has a couple of different modes that they cycle between on the fly, depending on what the scene calls for. This is the playful quality that was missing from the previous season and is a particular delight here.

A welcome return to form

Fargo fans, then, should be pleased with what they find here. It will, of course, deliberately antagonize those who feel they’re being made fun of by Hamm’s archaic Trumpian lawman, but the latest season isn’t about red state politics specifically, but ignorance and entrenched views, and a lack of empathy in a broader sense. It’s about characters who can’t see beyond the extent of their own noses being put on a collision course with their moral, political, and experiential opposites.

Who will survive that process, and how, is part of the fun. And this season is fun in a way that recaptures the unpredictable wildcard spirit of Fargo at its best.

What did you think of Fargo Season 5? Comment below.

RELATED: