Fargo Season 3 Review

One of the many delights of watching FX's Fargo is that each season, showrunner Noah Hawley seems to cast a British actor solely for the purpose of speaking with the bizarre Minnesotan accent that everybody in the series must utilize. In the inaugural season, it was Martin Freeman. In Season 2, it was Patrick Wilson. And this year, its Ewan McGregor. Adding to the delight, Hawley has cast him as two brothers - Emmett and Gus Stussy - each visually different, but with the pronounced similarity.

Twenty years ago, the Stussy brothers received an inheritance. Emmett received a sports car; Gus a book of stamps. Emmett persuaded Gus to trade, and their lives have gone in substantially different directions since. Now in 2010, Emmett is a millionaire, the 'Parking Lot King of the Northwest." Gus is a pot-bellied, balding parole officer, with a broken-down sports car. Gus' grudge, in typical fashion, sets the chain of events that push the season forward.

Angry enough to try and steal one of the stamps, Gus blackmails one of his parolees to do it. In typical Fargo fashion, he chooses the wrong man for the job, and his parolee accidentally murders a man. When he tries to collect on, Gus' girlfriend, a daring much younger con artist named Nikki Swango (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has him meet death by air-conditioning unit. This should be the end of things, but Swango, a competitive bridge player still wants her boyfriend to be made whole. She goes after the stamp, and when she doesn't get it, she does an unthinkable thing with a tampon.

But things are not going much better for Emmett. A year ago, at the height of the recent economic crisis, he and his business partner borrowed a million dollars from a man named V.P. Varga (David Thewlis, a revelation for those who only know him as Remus Lupin. When they try to repay the loan, Varga tells them - enigmatically, like so many Fargo villains - that the money was an investment, and they are now his 'partners'. We're not sure yet what exactly his enterprise is, but he and his associates are operating at a level that will easily terrify the viewer.

As always,. local enforcement is trying to get involved, but in this case, Deputy Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) is a little more personally involved. The person murdered in the original crime was her stepfather, and between dealing with the downsizing of her department, and trying to co-parent a child, she finds herself looking into it, and finding unsettling things about her stepfather's past.

In any other year, Fargo would be a shoo-in to win a lot of Emmys. The performances are electrifying, the dialogue is crisp and unsettling, and the overall mood is one of quiet dread, wondering which domino is going to fall next. Given the level of brilliance of limited series this year, it seems very possible that Fargo will fall by the wayside as it did last time. One can't escape the feeling watching it, though, that the Coen Brothers must be bursting with pride when every new season starts off. As is the case with so many of their movies, you watch each year, knowing that there's nothing like it on TV.

My score:4.75 stars.