Fargo
Channel 4
★★★★☆
The South Bank Show
Sky Arts
★★★☆☆
A complaint against Fargo might be that the Coen brothers’ franchise glories in amorality, drawing beauty from blood seeping from a head, comedy from violence and mockery from simple virtue. Yet season three’s finale was moral, in a deeply Old Testament way. Just about every bad deed was paid for. The Jehovah figure, chanced upon in the wilderness bowling alley two episodes previously by Nikki Swango, the con artist with a heart, was vindicated: “Though you soar like the eagle and make your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down.”
The final confrontation was between the corporate savage VM Varga and the good detective Gloria Burgle. Burgle, who had finally arrested Varga in her new job in homeland security, told him he would go to jail for conspiracy to murder. He predicted he would be saved by force majeure. Then the lights went, rendering him almost a shadow.
In contrast, in last week’s episode Burgle was hugged by her quaint colleague Winnie, who bestowed the love she had been denied by her stepfather and her husband. Suddenly the ladies’ room automatic tap and soap dispenser registered her presence. She became what she thought she was not: visible.
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It is a great compliment to Carrie Coon as Burgle, whose greatest sin was a failure always to hide irritation, that her performance was no less captivating than David Thewlis’s as Varga. Burgle pursued truth and love. Varga was all appetite, which was why whenever there was a meal being eaten, as at yesterday’s Christmas lunch round the Stussy family table, he would appear. Yet it was a pointless hunger. Varga was a bulimic who threw up everything he devoured.
Fargo’s creator, Noah Hawley, took us on many diversions this season: into the past, into the woods, into action movie territory (the warehouse massacre scene was as tense as you could wish). Yet it was the comedy of character we will remember: those three strong females played magnificently by Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Nikki and Olivia Sandoval as Winnie; Ewan McGregor’s surprisingly brilliant dual performance as the brothers Stussy; and Michael Stuhlbarg’s Sy Feltz, a portrait of a mental implosion. The last episode was not the best, but it still made Twin Peaks look like reheated huckleberry pie.
I would love to know if one of Britain’s finest television writers, Sally “Happy Valley” Wainwright, liked it. Her work, rooted as The South Bank Show insisted in plain-speaking Yorkshireness, could hardly be more different. There were a few missteps in Melvyn Bragg’s profile. Why, for one, play a song by Victoria Wood, who was from Lancashire, over Wainwright’s drive across West Yorkshire?
In interview, Wainwright was forced to take as praise Bragg’s backhanded compliment that the crowded plotting of Last Tango in Halifax was like a rugby match. He did, however, usefully identify the point her writing darkened, which was after she was wrongly accused of plagiarism. As for that controversial Happy Valley scene in which Catherine Cawood was beaten up, Lisa Farrand, the cop Cawood was partly based on, confirmed that it was not in the least exaggerated. It had happened to her, but “only twice”.
andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk