Fargo Season 5 Contains 'The Most Direct Homage' To The Coen Brothers' Film
The new season of FX's Fargo is about a month away. It became one of the most original series on the air when it premiered in 2014, and it remains just as innovative and compelling, which says maybe as much about the indefatigable creativity of its showrunner, Noah Hawley, as it does about the self-regurgitating ouroboros of modern television. We're used to anthology series by now — "American Horror Story," "The Wire," "Black Mirror" — but we aren't used to seeing prestige dramedies done in this format. "Fargo" is gorgeously mounted, always features an impressive cast, hooks viewers in each time with a new, juicy Midwestern mystery.
This time around, "Fargo" will star the eye-catching line-up of Juno Temple, Jon Hamm, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in a tale of kidnapping, cover-up, and harmless housewives who are secretly anything but.
Sound familiar? It's because this season of "Fargo" sounds a lot like the film from which the series was adapted, and often cleverly references in glancing ways. From the suitcase of cash discovered by Stavros (Oliver Platt) in season 1 that Steve Buscemi's Carl hid at the end of the film, to the same woodchipper being used by the show's Ed (Jesse Plemons, season 2) and movie's Gaear (Peter Stormare) to dispose of incriminating evidence, Hawley often winks at his source material. But according to Hawley himself, this coming season has the most direct connection between film and series yet, and we've already gotten a sneak peek in the trailer.
Knit and run
You know what they say: never knit in a movie, or you'll get murdered! Eagle-eyed "Fargo" fans will have noticed that in the trailer for the new season, dropped by FX earlier this week, Juno Temple can be seen knitting a lovely garment — the color looks to be a sort of iced cranberry — before she's interrupted by a hooded assailant who appears on her patio. It's hard not to immediately flash back to "Fargo." At a panel attended by /Film's Ryan Scott at this year's Austin Film Festival, Hawley addressed the connection:
"Season 5 is the most direct homage to the movie, because [Juno Temple's character] is sitting on the sofa knitting, watching the morning show, when a guy shows up in the mask, but who she is and who the guys are and what happens is very different."
As Hawley indicated, this exact incident plays out in the Coens' "Fargo." A character named Jean, played by Kristin Rudrüd, is knitting away the morning while watching a news program on the couch when a masked assailant (Buscemi) breaks into her house and kidnaps her. It seems that, as with the film, this "kidnapping" is not all that it seems in the series, but this time the question mark hovers over the victim of the crime herself.
Hawley elaborated on the decision to include such a direct tie thusly:
"[W]hen you take these moments from the Coen Brothers films that people are so familiar with and you use them in a different way, then the audience is both watching something familiar and something completely new at the same time. So two parts of your brain are active, you're both remembering and discovering at the same time, which I find is a really fascinating thing to play with for an audience."
Exactly what function this homage serves in the larger picture of the season will come to be known when "Fargo" season 5 premieres on November 21, 2023.