The Official Fargo on FX Thread
- Thread starter detroitwalt
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I know your sensibilities, and I promise you it only gets less tolerable.
Just finished watching this, and I have to say this was amazing.
I'm a big fan of dark comedies and this was right up my alley.
This dude Lester was the biggest fukk up/a$$hole character i've ever seen. They took Walter Whites decent into darkness over 5 seasons and condensed it into a single season for Lester. Dude deserved to go out like that for allowing his 2nd wife to get murdered in his place. She was so innocent and down for him.
Malvo was an awesome character/troll and fun as hell to watch. Every scene with him classic. In fact, I felt like this show did a great job of making every character interesting and worth paying attention to. Whether it was because of their personality, dialogue, situation, or otherwise. In addition to having great characters, the storytelling, cinematography, music, and depth is amazing.
As for the comparison to True Detective. I would say Fargo is slightly better. TD took a bit of a dip in the final few episodes, at least as far as the story is concerned. The ending for Fargo was a little more satisfying.
I'm a big fan of dark comedies and this was right up my alley.
This dude Lester was the biggest fukk up/a$$hole character i've ever seen. They took Walter Whites decent into darkness over 5 seasons and condensed it into a single season for Lester. Dude deserved to go out like that for allowing his 2nd wife to get murdered in his place. She was so innocent and down for him.
Malvo was an awesome character/troll and fun as hell to watch. Every scene with him classic. In fact, I felt like this show did a great job of making every character interesting and worth paying attention to. Whether it was because of their personality, dialogue, situation, or otherwise. In addition to having great characters, the storytelling, cinematography, music, and depth is amazing.
As for the comparison to True Detective. I would say Fargo is slightly better. TD took a bit of a dip in the final few episodes, at least as far as the story is concerned. The ending for Fargo was a little more satisfying.
I also wanted to say, I'm a huge fan of these single season shows and story lines. Its like a 10-12hr movie. Allows for more time to develop characters and stories compared to a 2 hr flick, yet it doesn't require the year to year commitment of a long running TV drama.
yea you won't like it...you're a loser with terrible taste, so you might as well skip it and go back to judging breath control rapping in the booth
Big Mel
@bigboss
The show was cast poorly. The H Macy & Frances Mcdormant roles specifically. This is some caricature shyt where the flick had actual, tragically flawed people behaving as such.
But you drop a guy in an ice hole and you're bound to attract an audience.
But you drop a guy in an ice hole and you're bound to attract an audience.
Mel, the show is mediocre fan fiction. I'm perplexed by the love it's getting.
Big Mel
@bigboss
TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
I love the movie and while I think the show isn't touching it by a long shot, it's still a good show. Yes, tonally it veers far more to exaggeration/caricature than the movie (they got Key and Peele playing FBI agents for crying out loud) but the story is great and the main cast spot on. And anyone who disagrees can get the hammer treatment:
Why is this show being compared to True Detective?
I like it a lot but I don't get a basis for comparison.
I like it a lot but I don't get a basis for comparison.
Big Mel
@bigboss
I love the movie and while I think the show isn't touching it by a long shot, it's still a good show. Yes, tonally it veers far more to exaggeration/caricature than the movie (they got Key and Peele playing FBI agents for crying out loud) but the story is great and the main cast spot on. And anyone who disagrees can get the hammer treatment:
even this gif speaks to how wack thus show is. Look at those goofy faces.
As I type this, a moron who runs out of gas discovers the briefcase Steve bushemi buried in the snow after giving himself over to The Lord a minute prior. This show is terrible. Oh, and blly bob aka slobier bardem made a a Buffon grocery tyc00ns shower rain blood.
Yeah, this show sucks. Super Jew goon & sign Language goon? Shameful.
MenacingMonk
Tranquilo
Aside from Billy's character, I loved the foreshadowing. shyt was 
TheGodling
Los Ingobernables de Sala de Cine
Why is this show being compared to True Detective?
Because both shows are in the anthology format which allows for movie stars to more easily commit to them, and both show creators are (primarily) novelists who wrote the entire season themselves, which makes both shows front runners on what many predict will be a new wave in television making (series with greater creator control and bigger stars). If you do a more direct comparison (style, atmosphere, thematics, etc.) they actually have little in common.
Grand Conde
Superstar
If you compare it to the movie then yes it is inferior.
As a stand alone TV programme it is better than most stuff out there.
It's difficult not to compare the show to the movie when it completely relies on the storylines and characters of several Coen bros movies. That'd be like asking me to completely forget about KRS when listening to Snoop's "Dog's Gonna Get Ya."
I disagree that as a stand alone program it's "better than most stuff out there." I found it similar to a lot of stuff out there: mediocre. That it had a cheat code - all of the Coen bros movies for fodder - makes the end result that much more lamentable. The show combined the worst elements of a bad Wes Anderson or Noah Baumbach film with c-level reinterpretations of the Coens' characters. Where the Coens rely on intelligence and subtlety, the show hinged totally on implausible circumstances, quirk, and spectacle.
The differences in plot and character tell the story of the difference between the Coens' grasp of the human condition and this show's lack of any such grasp. In the movie, a desperate man cooks up a poorly conceived plan to get money for a debt, and the plan spins out of control because those sorts of plans often do. In the show a hapless man is tortured by a grown oaf who joins with his two sons in reciting lines of dialogues that are over the top and insipid. The hapless man then encounters a mysterious, borderline mystical hitman who offers to murder the oaf... Just because. It's almost the exact same plot contrivance that serves as the engine for a Cuba Gooding B movie called The Hit List. When you share a plot contrivance with a Cuba Gooding Jr. straight-to-video project, yeah, yeesh, that's not a good thing.
There's a moment in the movie when the audience gets a glimpse of an old, racist statue - a subtle way for the Coens to situate the audience in the personal culture of the area, the specific characters. In the show creativity and subtlety are once again thrown out the window and we get Nygard as ******. Yeah, that's a hoot. Toss in a character named dikky Butts while you're at it. Let's really get the lame humor train off the tracks at warp speed.
The movie has amateur degenerate hitmen who complicate their own situation and Jerry's at every turn. The show has two professional hitmen who are sent to do battle with another hitman for the sake of oh shyt, hitmen vs. hitmen that's crazy and cool. Where the movie has a hitman who barely speaks, the show opts for a literal deaf mute. And that's the rub - the show takes each Coen character and turns that character into complete caricature, from Macy's Jerry to Bardem's Anton to the pair of killers. The movie has ransom money buried in the snow, where no one will find it, as if to illustrate the utter pointlessness of human endeavor. The show has a man find the magic case of money during a moment of extreme crisis, lapsing into common tv/film cliche. The show becomes spectacle for its own sake, and the dialogue is less philosophical than desperate stabs at profound/cool monologues that lack the oomph to truly move me or be memorable.
The Coens use outrageous turns of events and flawed characters to emphasize the often random, pitiless nature of life, of human existence. The show uses religious epiphany, implausible plot twists, 3 Stooges level goofball characters to celebrate zaniness for the sake of zaniness. The start of episode 7 is a perfect example: Billy Bob's budget Bardem character creepily pops up in a man's office and does his "I have two questions" routine. He asks "What do you have against Georgia?" There are pins marking each state on a map that hangs on the wall except GA. The man explains: "An ex-wife. Korean. She used to spit at me during sex." KOREAN! SPIT! SEX! QUIRKY! COOL! ZANY! It's trying so fukking hard to be cool that it becomes insufferable. A 9th grader who just saw his first Tarantino movie might write dialogue like that.
Far too much in the show is like this. So many faux-clever lines of dialogue desperately reaching for brilliance but falling into the sophomoric pile. Non-sequiturs, stale musings, lame parable. It's like a Coen Brothers' film... Without the brain. It's self-indulgent mediocre fan fiction. And that makes the show especially terrible to me. The guy who wrote the damn thing had all of this material from all these Coen movies - the show should be a layup. But he doesn't get it. It's as if he watched the same movies I did, but we liked them for totally different reasons. He seems more the annoying Big Lebowski quoting fan - the type who appreciate movies based on how many weird references the characters make, how over the top they are as caricatures, how "wild" everything is. I'm more of a Fargo, No Country guy: the characteristics of the players can be goofy, sure, but they inform us about the human condition, regional culture, etc. The violence is even insightful. The players all serve a purpose. Be they hapless or ruthless, they are in service to a larger commentary. I don't get that here. Everything - the goofiness, the violence - is for its own sake. And it falls flat.
Also, the acting is very bad. I usually enjoy homie from The Office. Here he's mugging too much and so pathetic it's less sinister than it is unbelievable. Colin Hanks is plain bad. And as enthusiastically as people are trumpeting Billy Bob's magical killing character, it's hard for me to take him seriously in that wig, looking nearly as feeble as Mr. Burns yet dragging a man through a building by his tie.
I look at it as a C-tier show. Clearly people in this thread, with the exception of Mel, disagree. That's fine, not looking to engage in a flame war. I've just been truly perplexed that people love it as much as they do.