The fourth season of Noah Hawley’s highly acclaimed FX series “Fargo” was a notable casualty of the pandemic as production shut down back in March with only two episodes left to be shot. A couple of weeks ago, the team behind the series started up again, trying to bring this year’s story in for its final chapter with a heavy amount of protective precautions designed to make that as likely as possible. Will viewers be able to tell? Probably not. But an even worse possibility is if the final episodes of this season somehow have to come to a halt again because of an outbreak. It must be tense on that set right now.
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And it turns out that tension is the driving force of this season of “Fargo” in every way. It a story of the violent formation of the American dream, captured in a turf war in Kansas City in 1950 between Black and Italian criminal organizations. At first, this season feels distinctly different from the first three seasons as early episodes are more somber and slowly paced than what fans will remember. It feels like Hawley is going less for the quirky black humor of the first three seasons and more for the tone of what was seen in Joel and Ethan Coen’s early serious films. The gang war narrative is surely meant to recall “Miller’s Crossing,” but there are also echoes of “Barton Fink” and even “Blood Simple” in here (with a few funny nods to “Raising Arizona” too). The drawn-out tone of Season 4 of “Fargo” is off-putting at the beginning—the first few episodes run over an hour and could all be trimmed a bit here and there—but the new chapters really settle into themselves around Episode 3 when its characters have all been defined and are then allowed to bounce off each other as life in Kansas City gets bloodier by the day.
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The premiere of Season 4 of “Fargo” introduces us to the key players, detailing how each generation would see turnover at the top of the organized crime ladder throughout the history of the city. There was a strange and fascinating tradition in Kansas City, wherein the head of competing crime families would literally trade a child to one another as a sort of insurance policy. If one family tried to strike at another, they would be less likely to do so with their own blood in their enemy’s house.
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When the season opens, newcomer Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) has sent his youngest son to live with the Italian mob family that runs the city just before said Italians are faced with a power struggle. The head of the Fadda family is murdered, which thrusts his son Josto (Jason Schwartzman) into a throne that may be a bit oversized for him. Josto’s brother Gaetano (Salvatore Esposito, looking so much like a wide-eyed, young Jon Polito that the resemblance feels like a reference to the Coen regular sheerly through casting) comes over from the old country and decides to stay, constantly pushing Josto to be more old-school in the way he runs his organization. When Loy and his people start to make waves, Gaetano’s maniacal drive is to destroy them with bloodshed. Josto may be a bit uncertain about being the King, but he’s also smart enough to play a longer game.
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As these battles unfold, Hawley and the writers pepper the supporting cast with eccentric flavor. The most “Fargo”-esque character is a nurse named Oraetta Mayflower (Jessie Buckley), who is openly racist, has kinky flings with Josto, and just happens to kill some of her patients. Buckley is phenomenal, turning a sweet disposition and thick Midwestern accent into something sinister and mesmerizing. Much of Season 4 is about how unexpected encounters can create ripple effects of violence and Oraetta really kicks off much of what follows with Loy and the Faddas.
That’s not even close to all. Oraetta lives across the street from a young woman named Ethelrida Pearl Smutny (E’myri Crutchfield) and her parents (Andrew Bird & Anji White), who end up owing Loy money. Loy has an army of loyal soldiers, none more so than the wise Doctor Senator (Glynn Turman) while Josto’s most fascinating ally is a quiet man named Rabbi Milligan (Ben Whishaw). He was a child traded years ago by another crime family who now ends up on the Fadda tree, protecting and getting closer to Loy’s son. A pair of criminals (Karen Aldridge & Kelsey Asbille) break out of a woman’s prison in the second episode (with a visual allusion to the same thing happening in “Raising Arizona”) and end up at the Smutny house. Finally, Jack Huston plays a twitchy local detective who is manipulated by all sides of the criminal empires in Kansas City and the great Timothy Olyphant plays a U.S. Marshal on FX yet again, coming to town after the aforementioned escaped convicts and discovering something much crazier going on. He’s not quite replaying Raylan Givens, but it’s as close to a “Justified” reboot as we’re going to get.
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Thematically, Hawley may not seem like the ideal person to examine race relations in the Midwest in the middle of the 20th century, and there are some aspects of how he does so that could feel tone-deaf to some people, especially early in the season. He’s attempting something very ambitious here that’s really captured in the title of the second episode: “The Land of Taking and Killing.” The new season of “Fargo” is about how much of society is formed through theft and murder, and how even these elements aren’t spread out fairly to all people. Even crime is built on a systemically broken society. Loy and Doctor Senator are often the smartest people in the room, but they have to fight harder for attention that their white and even Italian counterparts. Black lives are beaten and Black ideas are stolen throughout the fourth season of “Fargo,” but Hawley and his team are careful not to lean into that theme and allow it to dominate the season. They just recognize that inequality has to be a part of this story, and present racist characters and behavior in ways that feed the plot without feeling cheap or exploitative.
Clearly, there are some ambitious ideas at play here and the technical elements of “Fargo” are strong throughout, but what really starts to elevate Season 4 around that third episode is the ensemble. There are so many standout performances, especially Buckley, Whishaw, Olyphant, and Turman. “Fargo” may take itself a bit too seriously at times—Rock monologues so often in meetings that it starts to verge on parody—but this season is really a collection of incredible scenes, moments between characters in which actors are allowed to bite with both teeth into the kind of meaty roles that a performer loves to get. Everyone is at least good, and several people are great.
One of the hallmarks of the Coen filmography is that they can do any genre, starting their careers with a vicious noir, slapstick comedy, and gangster epic. It feels like Hawley looked at the first three seasons of his hit show and thought that they were too similar not only to each other but the Oscar winner that gives the series its name. They all have that black comedy sensibility with a dose of idiotic behavior and high body count. For the fourth season, which looked like it may not happen for a few years, he went back to the pre-“Fargo” Coen filmography and crafted a different kind of show, one that maintains that unexpected storytelling style but with a broader, more ambitious canvas than ever before. You betcha. [B+]
“Fargo” Season 4 will premiere on FX on September 27.
