There was a time when Noah Hawley was viewed as television’s next great auteur—whenever publications are likening your work to Stanley Kubrick’s, you’re doing something right. The Kubrick comparisons are a bit much, but in the peak era of Peak TV, there were few creators riding a higher wave than Hawley. By 2017, he had debuted three seasons of Fargo: an anthology series inspired by the Coen brothers classic of the same name that managed to honor the film’s legacy without being beholden to it. (Fargo’s first two seasons are unimpeachable; Season 3 boiled down to “mostly good and very fun,” the anthology’s equivalent of a speed bump.) That same year, Hawley also launched Legion: a show technically set in the X-Men universe that traded in conventional superhero storytelling for the kind of surrealism associated with David Lynch. (Hawley didn’t shy away from those influences; he even wrote a column about it.)
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
However, the fact that Hawley’s output was so impressive out of the gate only amplified the somewhat underwhelming nature of what followed it. The latter two seasons of Legion weren’t bad and were certainly better than the vast majority of superhero programming that audiences are currently suffering through, but the show was hindered by a deceptively simple story that couldn’t keep up with all the psychedelic imagery. (Legion also committed the cardinal sin of sidelining Aubrey Plaza after an absolute heater of a performance in Season 1.) As for Fargo’s fourth season, which focused on warring mob syndicates in 1950s Kansas City, the series didn’t have anything meaningful to say about America’s history of racism. Instead of being a morbidly funny crime drama—the core ingredient of what makes Fargo, well, Fargo—Season 4 was bogged down by well-intentioned but nevertheless didactic monologues on our country’s greatest sins. Hawley’s fortunes didn’t improve on the big screen, either: His feature film debut, Lucy in the Sky, loosely based on the real-life downfall of former NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, was a critical and commercial misfire that failed to include the most salacious detail of Nowak’s unraveling. (It should be a federal law that anytime a story features its protagonist wearing adult diapers, you have to include it.)
Despite these missteps, Hawley amassed enough goodwill that he’s writing and directing the first Alien television series: an ambitious swing of a project that, unfortunately, is unlikely to air until 2025. If you had told me in 2017 that Hawley was developing an Alien show, it would have been a much more tantalizing prospect—now, I’m just hoping he doesn’t tarnish a beloved franchise. Such is the swift nature of the nosedive of Hawley’s stock. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine anything more impressive than making a successful anthology series in the shadow of one of the Coen brothers’ most iconic movies. One mediocre season of Fargo doesn’t undo all the great stuff that preceded it—if anything, it’s probably given Hawley more incentive to right the ship. And sure enough, he has.
In Fargo’s fifth season, Hawley brings the series as close as it’s ever been to our present. The story begins in the fall of 2019 as a school board meeting in Scandia, Minnesota, devolves into chaos. When peppy housewife Dorothy “Dot” Lyon (Juno Temple) leaves the venue with her daughter, trying to avoid a violent confrontation with attendees, she accidentally Tasers a police officer. The incident lands Dot in a holding cell, where she’s mostly concerned about her fingerprints going into the system. Shortly after being released, Dot is attacked in her home by two masked intruders: She puts up a good fight, going full Home Alone on the assailants, but she’s ultimately kidnapped. Later that night, when the kidnappers’ van is pulled over by North Dakota deputies, Dot dashes over to a nearby gas station, and a shoot-out ensues. Long story short: Dot saves injured deputy Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris), killing one of the kidnappers in the process, before leaving on foot and returning home. Weirdest of all, Dot tells her husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), and the local authorities that nothing ever transpired—she just left for a few hours to clear her head. (Never mind that there’s someone else’s blood in the house.)
Something is amiss, and Fargo doesn’t waste time revealing who’s after Dot: North Dakota sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who was married to Dot before she made a new life—and identity—for herself. (Roy is the kind of Bible-thumping misogynist who believes that Dot is his property.) Meanwhile, Wayne’s domineering mother, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who runs the country’s largest debt collection agency, grows increasingly suspicious of Dot. In Lorraine’s mind, Dot married her son only to get a stake in their family’s fortune; the kidnapping could’ve been a ruse. Essentially, Dot is caught between two sinister figures: the one she ran away from and the one she joined by marriage. But while Dot’s in a precarious predicament, don’t mistake her for a damsel in distress. (She might be a Lyon, but the surviving kidnapper likens her, quite accurately, to a “tiger.”)
While every installment of Fargo shares some DNA with the eponymous Coen brothers film—Midwestern nice colliding with sinister elements of the criminal underworld—the fifth season cleverly remixes many key elements in this universe. A Midwestern housewife is kidnapped, only this time she’s more than capable of fighting back; her husband is a car salesman, except now he’s a meek bystander instead of a dopey conspirator; once again, the bickering kidnappers get their faces mutilated; and a kindly Minnesotan police officer (Richa Moorjani) tries getting to the bottom of this tangled web of intrigue. But while it’s tempting to read all these similarities as a concession that Fargo’s previous season strayed too far from a winning formula, Hawley also uses the familiar scaffolding to persuasively connect the series with the divisive times we’re living in.
It’s telling, for instance, that the season begins after the school board meeting erupts into violence: a microcosm of how civility continues to erode in our nation’s public spaces. (The why isn’t as important as the prevailing sense that such outbursts are now embedded in daily life.) What’s more, characters like Roy and Lorraine are compelling stand-ins for the malevolent forces that stoke the flames: a Trumpian lawman who believes the rules don’t apply to him, and a ruthless capitalist squeezing every last bit of hope from the country’s most debt-ridden citizens. It’s not a coincidence that Fargo’s fifth season takes place in the lead-up to the 2020 election—and the January 6 insurrection—or that some characters feel emboldened by all the social disorder. America is a powder keg; all it takes is a few chaos agents to light the match.
On paper, this sort of political commentary could sound as didactic as Fargo’s fourth season, which gave viewers a placid history lesson on racism. But the key distinction here is that Season 5 never lets these grim musings get in the way of a good time. From Dot’s outlandish attempts to convince everyone that she isn’t the second coming of MacGyver to sight gags like Roy sporting nipple rings and baring his ass in front of FBI agents, Fargo hasn’t been this funny in ages. (As Roy memorably tells the agents: “Does my discussing matters of state in moist repose bother you?”)
After a string of disappointments—at least by the high standards of an Emmy-winning auteur—it’s a relief to find Hawley back in fine form. Witty and topical without ever feeling preachy, this is Fargo’s strongest outing since Season 2, buoyed by career-best performances throughout the ensemble. (I’m jumping in early on the Juno Temple Emmys bandwagon.) If it once seemed like Fargo should have quit while it was ahead, Hawley has proved that this anthology has something left in the tank: Whether in the distant past or closer to our bleak present, the series is still finding new ways to explore what it means to be American, and how capitalism can make monsters of us all.
Of course, before Hawley can dive back into the world of Fargo, the Alien series is next on the docket. At first glance, it wouldn’t seem as if Alien has much connective tissue with Hawley’s series, but while xenomorphs terrorize humans throughout the franchise, corporate greed is what keeps putting the characters in harm’s way. Does this mean that Fargo’s terrific fifth season has changed my tune on Hawley’s Alien series? As Fargo’s unrelentingly friendly Midwesterners would put it: Oh, you betcha!
