Fargo's third season is a gory pleasure

It manages to feel both unique and delightfully familiar at the same time

Fargo, year 3.
(Image credit: Chris Large/FX)

Fargo comes back this week with a fresh crime and a new and impressive cast. The third season of Noah Hawley's TV riff on the Coens' hit film suggests that the relationship between the movie and the series is settling into something akin to a theme and variations. There might always be a set of squabbling brothers in Hawley's Fargoverse, along with a vaguely supernatural event, a beleaguered sheriff, and a quirky disregard for the sorts of details that make a crime show a procedural. But rather than merely repeat, these cycles seem to be accruing in ways that feel additive, as if a universe is being slowly and carefully built.

What's more, those variations are improving. If Fargo's first season got a little too starry-eyed over Lorne Malvo's hypermasculine brand of criminality, the second season course-corrected: The prequel was a pitch-perfect, Minnesota-nice deconstruction of bad guy bravado. Gone was the moral clarity that made Malvo a Satan figure. Gone was the mythic self-seriousness that equated villains with wolves. Season 2 developed a bigger sense of humor: In lieu of offering yet another antihero (or criminal mastermind), it lurched forward unplanned, propelled by a mix of adrenaline, coincidence, bad judgment, and good reflexes. Add in the odd UFO and Mike Milligan's fate, and you have a show immune to fetishizing either great criminals or great detectives. The universe is sub-rational in Fargo, and human stupidity plays an outsize role in explaining its events.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.