Fargo Season 5 is a Joke

Nothing about this season is Fargo.

There was a time when I would have called Noah Hawley my favorite writer. The first three seasons of Fargo remain the best television ever produced. They are unrelentingly funny, compelling, and awesome. His novel After the Fall is a very different but similarly excellent exploration of grief and humanity, and his work on other TV series such as Bones is standout among its peers. I eagerly awaited everything he did in college.

Then Fargo Season 4 came out. Fargo Season 4 was not excellent. It was protracted, dull, and pointless. I chalked it up to COVID misfortunes and ridiculous union health rules, and thus was not deterred from my love for the series as a whole. I fully expected Fargo’s next, fifth season to be back up to at least Season 3’s quality.

I have now finished watching the eighth episode of Season 5. I think it’s time I enter my stage of acceptance and say my peace on the series.

Fargo is a Farce

Season 4 was terminally fated because of obvious production limitations and a plot that could charitably be described as moralistic. It was full of monologues and fury, but signified nothing.

Season 5 is much worse. It is still moralistic, but additionally seems to demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the world on the part of its writers. It feels like a hallucination by AI. The characters embody political archetypes that Hawley seems to have never met or have any intimate knowledge of. The children act the wrong age and say the wrong things. The year is supposedly 2019, but the technological level seems more indicative of the 1980s. There is no Internet. There is no social media. There are no dashcams or bodycams or security cameras. The battered women characters do not act like real battered women. The cops do not behave anything like cops. The guns and injuries are completely wrong. The institutions depicted behave nothing like they would in real life. The story would be somewhat plausible in 1912, but in 2019, it’s a joke. No one acts like he really would if in the characters’ shoes.

Yet all is presented confidently, as though Hawley had no clue about the real world, no knowledge of how to write any of these places or characters or things outside of his Hollywood bubble, yet thought he could anyway.

Fargo is a farce. Its implausibility is part of its charm. It is filled with magic realism and coincidences that bring about the conclusion. That’s fine; it’s a comedy. It isn’t meant to be realistic.

But it still takes place in the real world. It isn’t a fantasy series. Its violence and drama loses all meaning if the rules of physics are disregarded by the writers at every opportunity. Lorne Malvo in Season 1 doesn’t get away with so many murders because no one cared to check CCTV footage or check for fingerprints; he gets away with it because he’s a ruthless and unflinching liar, and the Midwestern small-town cops are not prepared to face someone like him.

Lorne would not be scary if his success as a hitman were down only to other’s incompetence. The same can be said for the antagonists in Seasons 2 and 3.

Season 5 is not as poorly paced or awkwardly edited as Season 4. But it’s traded feeling rushed for the complete abandonment of any sense that this story takes place in the real world. There may be some merit buried deep within its story for those viewers capable of suppressing all need for verisimilitude, who won’t notice the complete absence of any security cameras or iPhones, or how the characters behave in the most insane ways at every turn in order to delay the climax, but even if you are capable of overlooking any basic consideration of modern technology or human behavior, what are you left with?

Season 5’s story is unsalvageable. Vapid #currentyear monologues on race have been replaced with vapid #currentyear monologues on domestic violence. The political themes are comically underwritten; the characters do not reflect their stated ideologies in any meaningful sense, because Noah Hawley has no idea what a rogue sheriff libertarian militiaman actually believes. Instead he writes what Hollywood thinks that person would believe. You would be surprised to learn the two are quite different.

Season 4 wasn’t woke for a number of reasons, despite its racial focus, but there’s no question that Season 5 is: it’s pointlessly politicized while being from an obvious left-wing viewpoint and being loaded with #MeToo themes. It’s moralistic and shallow, existing more to instruct than entertain.

Why is Fargo political now? I think we all know, but it’s a shame that it’s shaken out this way. Neither the film nor the first three seasons have any remotely political theming. (Except for random Ronald Reagan, but that had more to do with the 1980s setting than political commentary.)

It still might have been done well, if the characters had been written with a tinge more empathy and intelligence. Maybe there could be a crazed right-wing militiaman antagonist in Fargo. Maybe he could be compelling, quoting the Constitution and somehow using Milton Friedman to justify homicide. But turning him into a generic “Christian man bad” cliche is not what this series needed. I’ve said it before and will happily say it again: the South-talking villain who quotes the Bible while doing evil is one of the stalest cliches in the modern writer’s repertoire. I never want to see it again, and I certainly did not want to see it in Fargo.

But even had the characters been written correctly, the plot of Season 5 beyond its themes is non-existent. There are countless diversions to minor side characters who don’t matter. There is no sense of build-up. There are no personalities to care about. No one behaves in truthful ways, and nothing ever makes any sense. Things happen because they’ve been contrived to happen in a certain way, but not because these characters in this situation would actually lead to that outcome.

Whatever this show is—bad, boring, not funny—it certainly isn’t Fargo. Fargo is a series about decent Midwesterners who get caught up in criminal conspiracies, encounter horrific violence, and find themselves facing down Evil itself. That is what Lorne Malvo represents. When Lester Nygaard’s life is touched by Evil, his life changes forever.

All three good seasons follow this basic pattern. The archvillain is Evil incarnate. The characters are normal, decent people who make one mistake and find their lives in the balance. Mistakes pile on top of each other, until finally they all fall down.

Neither Season 4 nor 5 replicates this. They don’t even try. Season 4 is about racism and gang dynamics, and Season 5 is about religion and domestic violence. The characters are not normal people. No one grounds us to reality. There is no Evil force that sets the plot in motion.

Season 5 of Fargo is lazy. Intellectually it has skipped arm day. No care has gone into working out the story so as to mesh with the setting. Locations haven’t been carefully picked. Scenes have not been constructed to drag us further down the plotline. The whole thing comes across like no one writing it cared.

Season 5 of Fargo feels like it was written by AI. If 4 was a tale told by an idiot, full of monologues and fury, signifying nothing, then I suppose Season 5 is a tale told by a coma patient. It’s about as exciting as you would expect.

It pains me to say it, but Hawley, I think we need to break up—and I hope Fargo doesn’t another season.