{"id":13915,"date":"2014-04-18T23:18:12","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T13:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=13915"},"modified":"2014-04-25T23:20:11","modified_gmt":"2014-04-25T13:20:11","slug":"fargo-season-one-the-crocodiles-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=13915","title":{"rendered":"Fargo – Season One – “The Crocodile’s Dilemma”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tagtv\"<\/a>\"fargotv\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fargo<\/em>
\nSeason 1, Episode 1
\n\u201cThe Crocodile’s Dilemma\u201d<\/h3>\n

I’m not sure why Noah Hawley and Adam Bernstein decided to remake the Coen Brothers film Fargo<\/em> into a television series.\u00a0 It seems a thankless task.\u00a0 I came in very pessimistic.\u00a0 The pilot opens with a familiar shot of a car speeding on the freeway at midnight with the headlights just barely giving our eyes a chance to register whats on the road ahead.\u00a0 It’s like Fargo<\/em>.\u00a0 Except you’re seeing it reshot by someone else.\u00a0 It’s TV so they can’t hold the shot as long as Roger Deakins does.\u00a0 It doesn’t have the grinding, unsettling score from Carter Burwell.\u00a0 It’s like the original Fargo<\/em> but not as good.\u00a0 They keep the opening title about being based a true story.<\/p>\n

After the opening shot, the pilot wisely veers away from being slavishly faithful to recreating the original.\u00a0 Our beloved idiot Jerry Lundegaard has been replaced by Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman).\u00a0 Instead of car sales, Nygaard deals in insurance.\u00a0 He has a wife Pearl who constantly berates him and compares him unfavourably to Lester’s younger and more successful brother Chaz.\u00a0 For all intents and purposes, Nygaard is much the same as Jerry was though.\u00a0 A meek, ordinary jobsworth who is frustrated, greedy and gets in over his head.<\/p>\n

The original Fargo<\/em> is a film that is filled with sad, greedy and lonely people.\u00a0 The shining light amongst the darkness is Officer Marge Gundersson.\u00a0 She is smart, cheerful and intelligent.\u00a0 Marge has a simple, loving husband Norm and a baby on the way.\u00a0 It is her persistence and tenacity that eventually solves the case and brings the criminals to justice.\u00a0 Disappointingly, the pilot gets rid of Marge’s character and replaces her with Sheriff Vern, who has a pregnant wife, and his understudy Molly.\u00a0 In the bloody aftermath of the shootout in Lester’s home, I guess we’re left with Molly to fill Marge’s role.\u00a0 I’m not familiar with Alison Tolman but she did not leave much of an impression on me in this episode.\u00a0 She’s got her work cut out for her filling Frances McDormand’s boots thats for sure.<\/p>\n

\"fargotv2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The highlight of the Fargo<\/em> pilot, and perhaps the biggest reason to think that this remake could be anything other than a pale imitation of what came before it is Billy Bob Thornton who plays the deliciously diabolical and meddlesome Malvo.\u00a0 Malvo isn’t really a cipher for Steve Buscemi’s Carl.\u00a0 He is something altogether different.\u00a0 He reminds me of Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men<\/em>, with his weird haircut and strange line of questioning, constantly toying with everyone he meets, as if deciding whether to kill them on the spot or not.<\/p>\n

It is Malvo’s impromptu conversation with Lester in a hospital and his subsequent decision to murder a childhood bully who re-enters Lester’s life that triggers the chain of events that make Fargo<\/em> so captivating by the end of the pilot.\u00a0 Billy Bob Thornton plays Malvo as the devil on your shoulder, bringing out the worst in people and then sitting back quietly as he watches the chaos he created unfold.<\/p>\n

Fargo <\/em>is set to run for ten episodes as a stand alone season.\u00a0 If it gets picked up for a second season, there would be a whole new cast of characters.\u00a0 This can only be a good thing.\u00a0 I don’t know why anyone would want to remake Fargo<\/em> but by the end of the pilot, I was a believer.\u00a0 This could<\/em> work.\u00a0 Even if all else fails, watching Billy Bob Thornton fuck with people’s minds for a couple of months should be a barrel of laughs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kinda funny looking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1866,1865,1509,1794],"class_list":["post-13915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv","tag-billy-bob-thornton","tag-fargo","tag-martin-freeman","tag-tv-guide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13915"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13916,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13915\/revisions\/13916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}