In Its New Season, Fargo Finally Tries to Be Fargo . It’s Not Pretty.

The last time a new season of Fargo dropped, there was a still a Coen brothers to compare it to. Noah Hawley’s anthology series, whose fifth season premieres Tuesday on FX, has always been a strange bird, part fanboy homage, part radical remix, reassembling the pieces of Joel and Ethan Coen’s movies into stories that were, if not wholly original, something substantially other than straightforward remakes. While the Coens were still making movies together, Hawley’s mimetic riffs stirred an uncanny feeling of not-quite recognition, faithful to the originals’ surfaces—deadpan violence, funny accents, and the like—but lacking the Midwestern sensibility central to the brothers’ ethos. You know the feeling you get when “Fast Car” comes on and you realize it’s the Luke Combs version? Multiply that by four seasons and 18 movies.

In 2023, though, Hawley’s version of the Coens is all we’ve got. Joel and Ethan went their separate ways after 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and five years later, there are only the faintest rumblings about them getting the band back together. Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, a somber, accomplished adaptation without a scrap of original dialogue, and Ethan’s forthcoming Drive-Away Dolls, which looks to be an affectionate homage to 1960s exploitation pictures, might make it clearer who contributed what to their famously seamless collaboration. (The less said of Ethan’s amateurish Jerry Lee Lewis documentary, which has vanished since its Cannes premiere in 2022, the better.) But there’s no indication, at least as of yet, that their individual works will come anywhere close to matching the fruits of their two-headed labors. It’s a lot more tempting to see a tribute act when there’s no way to see the real thing.

Fargo has always rummaged freely through the Coens’ toy box, but its fifth season brings it back to the source: Fargo does Fargo. The series starts at the movie’s end, with a plainspoken Minnesota policewoman (Richa Moorjani) advising the criminal in her backseat of the error of their ways. But rather than a hardened lawbreaker, Deputy Olmstead’s catch is the most innocuous of perpetrators: a Midwestern housewife, Dot (Juno Temple), who accidentally tased a police officer while trying to extricate herself and her young daughter from a public brawl. Dot tries to argue that she was just a “mama lion” trying to protect her cub, but Olmstead suggests there’s more at work than maternal instinct, reminding her what you call a group of lions: “a pride.”

The very next scene, in which Dot gets her mug shot taken, Raising Arizona–style, reveals that Dot’s last name is, in fact, Lyon, which underlines one of the key differences between Hawley and the artists he’s made his career by emulating. The Coens would sooner die than admit that their work has any greater significance: Press Ethan or Joel on how the hats in Miller’s Crossing function as a symbol of the devotion the movie’s gangster hero owes to his boss, and he’d reply with something like “It’s just a hat.” But Hawley desperately wants you to see his work. That’s true not just in terms of the show’s relentless citations, like when Olmstead repeats Marge Gunderson’s “It’s a beautiful day,” or another of the season’s characters surmises that Dot, who goes missing at the end of the first episode, may have “kidnapped herself.” It’s also in the way we’re encouraged to read the season’s opening moments—in which a full-scale riot breaks out at a PTA meeting—as a reference to both the Jan. 6 insurrection and the soft takeovers of local school boards by right-wing extremists. These are Easter eggs hidden the way you would for a toddler’s hunt, perched in full view atop a potted plant.

Although the season is set in 2019, Hawley stuffs his story with post-2020 signifiers. There are references to election fraud and to the duty of self-proclaimed patriots to act outside and even against the rule of law. Jon Hamm’s Roy Tillman, a rural sheriff who emerges as the season’s primary antagonist despite making only a brief appearance in the first episode, is an authoritarian figure who rules through a combination of charisma and brazen self-interest, a Trump analogue so brazen it’s a wonder his followers don’t wear red hats. His connection to the story doesn’t become clear right away, but suffice it to say he sees no reason why his jurisdiction should stop at the county line, and can justify using any method as long as it’s in service of what he sees as the proper order of the world—male-dominated and biblically prescribed.

His counterpart in just-this-side-of-lawful immorality is Dot’s mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a millionaire debt baron whose office features a giant painting reading, simply, “No.” (In further Fargo-on-Fargo action, her hapless son, played by David Rysdahl, works as a car salesman, although several episodes in, he has yet to hard-sell any of his customers on the value of TruCoat.) She’s as vicious and cold-blooded as Jean Smart in Fargo’s second season, but her character feels like a jumble of spare parts: Leigh reprises her mid-Atlantic accent from the Coens’ own The Hudsucker Proxy, but Lorraine pauses the family Christmas photo to cram an automatic rifle into every family member’s hands, a show of “strength” that makes her feel more like a Southern matriarch than a Main Line doyenne. And Hawley isn’t just playing “Remember this?” with the Coens’ movies, but with the past few years’ headlines: Lorraine coldly refers to her suit-wearing granddaughter as “the cross-dresser,” Roy notes that “Jesus was a man, not some bearded lady,” and Sam Spruell’s Ole Munch, the equivalent of No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh (both are barely-human killers with comically awful haircuts), even wears a knee-length skirt as he mows down a policeman with a machine gun. The show doesn’t have anything to say about the surge in anti-trans panic. It just wants credit for recognizing that it exists, and then it drops the subject entirely.

Juno Temple plays Dot with such ah-geez ingenuousness that you know there’s a shoe waiting to drop, and drop it does, when a pair of masked men show up at her house intending to abduct her for reasons unknown. Making quick if nonstandard use of household implements, she defends herself with bursts of purposeful violence, and she’s even more inventive later when fending off a siege in a rural gas station. (The matter-of-fact way Dot lays her deadly traps, as if she’s meal-planning for the week ahead, is the season’s best running gag.) But it’s much easier to emulate the arch performance style of the Coens’ movies than it is to convey a sense of the character beneath the quirks, and Temple never gives a sense of who Dot is at her core, even when it turns out later in the season that there are many more shoes left to drop. Leigh too seems overdirected, all nasal consonants and power-suit scowls. Hamm strikes a more effective balance, an earthly terror as opposed to Spruell’s unearthly one, and he underplays the character’s comic excesses so effectively that even when he rises from a hot tub to show off a pair of nipple rings, you don’t feel prodded to guffaw.

Hawley is an avid Coens disciple, but he’s a literalist, repeating the Fargo movie’s “This is a true story” opening at the beginning of every Season 5 episode as if it were a statement of purpose rather than a gag. In the Coens’ movies, what sound like thesis statements are often red herrings, designed to befuddle and mislead anyone who makes the mistake of reading too much into their work. They’re serious filmmakers, but they’re terrified of taking themselves too seriously—see the vicious portrait of a narcissistic artist in Barton Fink. Hawley is disinclined or perhaps incapable of replicating their self-effacing charm. When the Coens dangle bait, he goes for it every time.