Fargo
Channel 4
★★★★☆
The Muppets
Sky1
★★★☆☆
Bright red blood in crisp white snow. Think of Fargo — either the 1996 Coen brothers movie or the distant cousin that came to television last year — and it’s probably the blood-in-snow imagery that you’ll recall first. Now its second TV incarnation has landed, and along with the new cast (Ted Danson, Kirsten Dunst) and new time frame (1979, post-Vietnam), we’ve got a new visual: blood in milk, as a shooting in a diner goes grimly cack-handed. It’s striking white-on-red horror, even if it was trumped on Sunday by Downton’s blood-on-the-tablecloth eruption. Perhaps Julian Fellowes is a Fargo fan?
As with both versions before, this Fargo’s violent outbursts are offset by delicacy and dark laughs. The 1970s backdrop is stylish and cinematic, a beautiful palette of blues and browns colouring the Minnesota backwaters. Noah Hawley, the writer who also conceived season one, is starting a new story from scratch, but it’s a continuation of sorts — Molly Solverson, the dependable police presence from the last run, is in her childhood bedroom; her dad Lou (Patrick Wilson) is calmly investigating the shoot-out, while his wife cooks soufflé and fights cancer.
The details are intriguing and interestingly funny as everyday mundanity rubs up against big-picture menace. I loved the bingo-hall scene in which each number called was punctuated by Nick Offerman’s conspiracy theorist spouting on about Ho Chi Minh. I enjoyed the subtlety when cutesy Peggy (Dunst) accidentally ended up with a corpse on her car bonnet and drove it into her garage, the dead body gently nudging against a tennis ball hung from the ceiling. Weekend at Bernie’s meets Swingball, sort of.
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I didn’t buy into everything — did we need so many split-screen shots? What did the Western-style flashback prologue add, except introducing another fictionalised “true story” and Ronald Reagan when he was an actor? Why did Peggy want to cover up her hit-and-run? I suspect every question has a superlatively twisted answer.
We already know that Reagan will become a character later in the series and that Peggy’s odd behaviour is met brilliantly by Jesse Plemons from Breaking Bad, a delight as her wholesome husband. We may miss Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton, last year’s bad lads, but I’m already enamoured by the crime family the Gerhardts — like an art-house version of the Mitchells. We’ve got nine more episodes through which to unravel the funny little puzzle of accents, habits and garden-tool violence. It’s a fine prospect indeed.
Is there a support group for kids’ TV creations that have been brought out of retirement? You know, where Danger Mouse gets a reassuring cuddle from Granny Clanger, while Brains from Thunderbirds weeps about all the CGI surgery he had to have to re-enter the modern world?
Added to that club are The Muppets, who are back with a mockumentary series. It doesn’t serve them splendidly well. It’s like they’ve reunited to do The Office and in the process have made it too calculated to be joyous. Really, it’s the same ingredients as ever — Kermit, Piggy, celebrity turns, behind-the-scenes silliness — so it should work. Shame. Send in Penfold to give them all a backrub . . . maybe things will improve.
alex.hardy@the-times.co.uk