What if you could live inside your favorite movie, or simply have it go on longer — maybe five times as long.
That’s the case with “Fargo” (FX, 10 p.m.),the new 10-episode adaptation inspired by the Coen brothers’ classic 1996 film. There was an attempt to turn it into the series before – with a 2003 pilot directed by Kathy Bates and with Edie Falco starring as Marge Gunderson, the Brainerd cop played by Frances McDormand.
The new version is not quite as literal. Written entirely by Noah Hawley, it inhabits the same psychic space — honest, shy people living out on the tundra occasionally getting mixed up with the most violent people, with local cops trying their best to sort out the evil. There are no direct correlation between this world and that of William H.Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard, but it’s clear that Martin Freeman’s Lester Nygaard is a small town guy cut from the same Scandinavian cloth.
That he gets caught up with some ugly stuff orchestrated by a bad guy drifting through town — Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne Malvo — begins the ball rolling to all kinds of frozen mayhem. Like the original, there is overlap between humor and the shock ofviolence. There isn’t a woodchip involed — at least not quite yet.
While there’s a doozy of a conundrum to start, the story begins to take on some additional tales, like a snowball down a Bemidji hill. And as that happens, the cast gets more and more impressive, with Colin Hanks as a shaky Duluth cop, Kate Walsh as a floozy widow, Bob Odenkirk as a clueless deputy, Adam Goldberg as a henchman whose partner is deaf, David Carradine as a diner operator, Oliver Platt as a local grocery king — and in the episodes to come the comics Glenn Howerton, nearly unrecognizable from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and both “Key & Peele.”
But some of the strongest cast members are new comers, including Allison Tolman as a Bemidji cop bent on solving what’s becoming a series of crimes. It’s super enjoyable stuff, artfully shot and rich in detail. Like “True Detective,” it’s an anthology in the sense that there will be a new case each season, and each season is limited, only 10 episodes. All the reason more to relish it more.